The debut feature from Guillermo del Toro announced the then 28-year-old former special effects creator as an imaginative and innovative new talent. It laid the groundwork for much of what was to come in his stellar career – events seen through the eyes of a child, sympathy for the monster, the presence of Ron Perlman in the cast.
As befits a story obsessed with time and immortality – from its title to the frequent presence of clocks – Cronos is set in three time periods. We begin in 1536 with an alchemist (Mario Iván Martínez) who creates the Cronos device, a metal, beetle-shaped mechanism with a living creature at its heart that can bestow immortality on its owner. Cut to 1937 and the alchemist is killed in an accident, his heart pierce by debris from a collapsing building. The bulk of the story is set in a very near future (1996), multi-lingual, multi-cultural Mexico where elderly antique dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) finds the Cronos device hidden in the statue of am archangel. After winding the device’s mechanism, it grips his and with mechanical legs and injects him with some never-identified liquid and starts to find his youth being restored as a consequence. But hot on the trail of the device is wealthy but ailing businessman Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook) who despatches his brutish nephew Angel (Perlman) to retrieve it. Angel murders Gris, who has by now developed a taste for human blood, but he returns from the dead and is reunited with his adoring granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath). But Angel isn’t giving up and Gris and Aurora are forced into a final confrontation with de la Guardia.
A beautiful and clever revision of the vampire story, Cronos is a cautionary tale about our desire for immortality and the high price we would have to pay to achieve it, a dark fairy story about older men who should know better but who still go to pieces at the merest hint of having their youth restored and their life extended. It marked Del Toro as a director of intelligent, atmospheric and inventive genre films at the start of a career that would bounce back and forth between less interesting studio films (Mimic (1997), Blade II (2002), Pacific Rim (2013)) and more personal and rewarding ones (El espinazo del diablo/The Devil’s Backbone (2001), El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), The Shape of Water (2017)). He’d never make anything else quite like Cronos but there are many of his obsessions on show here – the close ups of clockwork and whirring cogs, insects, the treatment of the fantastical as a mundane art of normal, everyday life, the religious imagery and more.
Those religious allegories are a bit on the nose here – they’d become subtler over time – with it’s Christmas setting, the hero named Jesús Gris, who is reborn, a character named Angel and much talk of eternal life. But it’s not just Christian symbolism that underpins the film – there’s Aurora, the Egyptian goddess of the dawn and the Cronos device (not dissimilar in its function as the key to new experiences to the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser (1987)) is shaped like a scarab beetle, a symbol of renewal and rebirth, operated here by a key decorated with the Ouroboros symbol, another symbol of immortality.
There are clocks everywhere in Cronos, ticking down the seconds of eternity. If you can’t see them, you can often hear them, or something similar, ticking away on the soundtrack. Time is the enemy of us all in the end and attempting to cheat it, the film proposes, will only lead to heartache. The climactic scenes of Gris and Angel fighting it out on a roof top in front of giant letters that surround another of the omnipresent clocks, recalls a similar scene in that other tale of immortals and the horrors they face in trying to maintain their extended lifetimes, Highlander (1986).
For a fledgling director, del Toro gets some great performances from his cast. Argentine actor Federico Luppi is excellent as the initially more reluctant of the two older men, a vampire not by his own chose – there’s a feeling that the Cronos device chose him rather than the other way round, though why is something we never work out. There’s a marvellously affecting moment when the risen Jesús returns home to an adoring and unquestioning Aurora who simply accepts him back into the house where he shelters from the sun in her coffin-like toy chest, snuggled up with her doll and teddy bear.
Tamara Shanath as Aurora is marvellous too – barely speaking, merely observing until the time comes to step up to the plate and save her grandfather no matter how monstrous he might have appeared to become – at one point the dignified Gris is reduced to hungrily lapping up blood from a nosebleed spilled on a toiler floor. But no matter how much of a “monster” he becomes, del Tori characteristically ensures that we stay on his side throughout – he’s a reluctant monster and struggles with his darker side throughout. And it’s his love for Aurora which ultimately may provide his salvation and a reason to keep on going – “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he tells her. “But I think it’s best if we’re together.”
Claudio Brook is suitably sinister as the obsessed de la Guardia, Perlman would be rewarded for his work here with a long string of appearances in future del Toro films, including taking the leading role in Hellboy (2004) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) and Daniel Giménez Cacho would reprise his small role as Tito the mortuary attendant in Jorge Michael Grau’s Somos lo que hay/We Are What We Are (2010).
Speaking to Tom Kiesecoms of the ScreenAnarchy website in 2018 after the release of The Shape of Water, del Toro compared the two films. “The instruments that you have to make a movie,” he said., “as a filmmaker you become infinitely more sophisticated but if you see Cronos and The Shape of Water and realize that they are both about time, both about timelessness, and about a protagonist that is silent and both are about the monster being monstrous but not being feared but loved and cared for, and one is a vampire that sleeps in a toybox and the other one is a creature that sleeps in a bathtub, and they are so similar, so similar that it’s almost shocking … What is beautiful is that the essence of a filmmaker is the same but the tools by which that filmmaker expresses himself are far more sophisticated now than then.”
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