Guillermo del Toro’s feature debut from 1992 is a work regarded by many as an early masterpiece, featuring the director’s key repertory players Federico Luppi and Ron Perlman. Yet for all its wit and strangeness, this film underscores my feeling I am not fully part of the Del Toro true believer fanbase. I find myself restive at the elaborate, intricate but sometimes slightly inert visual contrivances, though I have always enjoyed his films, perhaps especially his remake of Nightmare Alley.
Cronos is a macabre body-horror comedy, perhaps more intriguing than frightening, with a hint of steampunkiness; it looks almost like a feature-length pilot for some cult TV show that never got made. There is a faintly perfunctory prologue sequence about an “alchemist” in the 16th century who invented the Cronos, a device with the complex mechanism of a watch, but which has a kind of immortal insect-creature within it whose body evidently extrudes magical liquid that can be implanted into the body of the owner via tiny metal stingers which emerge from the Cronos’s sides.
The Cronos is lost for centuries until it is discovered by chance in the present day by the interestingly named Jesús Gris (Luppi), a kindly old grandfather and antiques dealer, not unlike the bookshop owner Mr Coreander in Wolfgang Petersen’s The NeverEnding Story. He finds himself pricked by the Cronos; this starts to make him younger (although, disconcertingly, not all that much younger) and burdens him with a vampire-like thirst for blood. He attempts to gratify this in a men’s washroom in one gruesome sequence, although his bloodthirst is not an important problem in the narrative.
Jesús’s possession of the Cronos enrages a sinister dying plutocrat called Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook), who has been on trail of the Cronos for years and who employs his thuggish nephew Angel (Perlman) as his all-purpose goon and tough guy. (Amusingly, the lunkhead Angel keeps getting his nose broken in fights.) There are many bizarre set-pieces, particularly when Jesús’s apparently dead and mangled body has to be smartened up by creepy mortician Tito (Daniel Giménez Cacho) prior to the funeral; Tito is indignant to discover that the body is to be cremated and all his artistry is to go up in flames.
And so Cronos gallops on, in its peculiar way, to a conclusion that is weird without being especially shocking. But it certainly has a distinctive authorial signature, the work of a very individual film-maker.
• Cronos is on digital platforms and UHD/Blu-ray from 24 February.
