Guillermo del Toro Made a Memorable Directorial Debut With Cronos

Like many fairy tales, Cronos follows a lead character you’d never expect to fall into a grand adventure. In this case, the unexpected protagonist is Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), an antiques dealer who has stumbled upon a most unusual trinket in an archangel statue. It’s a golden circular object called the Cronos device that, when placed on his body, latches itself onto Gris. It’s painful at first, but soon, Gris becomes addicted to Cronos. Gris isn’t the only one fixated on this object. The powerful but dying old man Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook) wants this fantastical creation for himself because it grants immortality. Cronos has some additional unusual side-effects for its users, including giving Gris a strange compulsion to devour blood.

Cronos serves as the directorial debut for Guillermo del Toro, who also wrote the script. Sometimes, it takes a filmmaker multiple movies to establish their own unique style. In the case of del Toro, he pretty much leaped right out of the gate with a quintessentially Guillermo del Toro production. A fairy tale story set in the modern world? It’s here. A protagonist whose some kind of literal monster that we’re supposed to sympathize with? Yep. Even the interior of Cronos, with its golden coloring and multitude of gears, looks like it could belong to a member of the Golden Army from the second Hellboy movie.

Also keeping consistent with future del Toro movies is the fact that Cronos makes for an entertaining watch that’s rich with enough details to keep you thinking about it long after its over. Something that especially stuck around in my mind is Ron Perlman as Angel de la Guardia, the nephew of the main villain. Angel does all the dirty work for Dieter, particularly anything related to interrogating Gris for information on Cronos. However, in a clever twist, Angel has no real stake in this conflict. He doesn’t have any interest in Cronos, he’s only a menace to Gris because his uncle won’t stop pestering him.

Angel is more interested in plastic surgery for his nose than anything else. Hunting down Gris is more a nuisance than anything else. There’s a sense of everyday humanity in this villain that reinforces the down-to-Earth quality of the characters in Cronos. Del Toro’s script balances these relatable elements with delightfully over-the-top scenes of horror gruesomeness. Both del Toro’s writing and his direction wring the most eeriness out of these kind of sequences, particularly one where Gris is in a fancy bathroom and is drawn to a puddle of blood on the floor. The slow-paced nature of the scene creates a sense of dread in the viewer as they begin to realize that Gris plans on kneeling down on the floor and licking up this puddle of blood.

What a sharp contrast to the kindly old man who was all too happy to play games with his granddaughter early in the story. This transformation proves effective because Cronos shows equal levels of attention to the grounded and the stylized. This balance continues to be handy once the third act begins and Gris becomes an undead figure. This is where del Toro’s love for sympathetic monsters come into play, as the zombified Gris is portrayed as a tragic figure now unable to really connect with the ones he loves. Meanwhile, in a storytelling move that mirrors Michael Shannon’s villain in The Shape of Water, the actual monsters in Cronos turn out to be the two decidedly human members of the de la Guardia family.

This version of Gris makes great use of practical visual effects to depict Gris becoming a whole other being, one that’s shedding its human skin. Extremely convincing makeup work is used to convey this effect and that work is made even more impressive given the low $2 million budget of Cronos. Just as an observation, I’d be curious to know if del Toro intentionally made the final form of Gris resemble the Hammer Films version of Frankenstein’s monster. With his white hair, purple skin and assortment of scars, I kept getting reminded of Christopher Lee’s take on that famous movie monster. Meanwhile, the sympathetic quality to Gris in this form resembles how the classic Universal monster movies (particularly Bride of Frankenstein) portrayed Frankenstein’s beast as such a tragically lonely character.  

Cronos evokes classic Frankenstein movies but it’s not just a Frankenstein knock-off. On the contrary, the film is full of idiosyncratic details that help to make it a fantastic kick-off for the directorial career of Guillermo del Toro.