Down by lore: "Cronos"

In his 1992 debut Cronos, the young Guillermo del Toro announced a fondness for design, bric-a-brac, tchotchkes: what if Dracula, the film proposed, but a version of Dracula where the bloodsucker was an objet trouvé, rather than the undead? Its setting, for the most part, would be a Mexico City antiques shop haunted by the ticking of several dozen clocks and operated by the grey-haired, Geppetto-looking Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), whose first name will become more significant as the film proceeds. One Christmas, Señor Gris takes delivery of a black-market statue whose base contains a golden clockwork device in the shape of a scarab beetle; this he removes before selling the statue on to an American businessman (Ron Perlman). The businessman, it transpires, has been sent this way by his ailing uncle (Claudio Brook) with specific instructions to retrieve the beetle - which, we learn, was originally manufactured by an alchemist to bestow eternal youth on its owner; this it does by clamping onto the owner's flesh and drawing blood, an MO that Señor Gris discovers the hard way. There are gains from this process: the device grants him a fresher-faced appearance (Luppi gets to do the Benjamin Button thing a decade-and-a-half before it was a thing) and injects a renewed vigour into his relationship with wife Mercedes (Margarita Isabel). There are also, he finds, losses: being pursued by those who really, truly want what he's got, all while having to deal with certain enhanced... appetites.

What's notable revisiting Cronos now, in the wake of del Toro's more expansive and extravagant American studio productions, is its underlying economy. (Not for del Toro the indulgent sprawl of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, released the same year. Not yet, at any rate.) This script works to a tried-and-tested three-act structure: thirty minutes of set-up, thirty minutes of transformation (wherein bloodsucking becomes analogous to addiction: not for nothing does it involve a metal spike, and licking up blood from bathroom floors), thirty minutes of resolution. As has always been his wont, del Toro chooses to doodle over the top of this framework, in this instance with an insectoid reading of the Bible, a ludic streak that could only have been put here by a lifelong collector (Gris compares the device to having a toy, but not the instructions), a blackly comic visit to a funeral parlour apparently staffed by Wolverine and Guildenstern, and rich handfuls of lore tossed in like the soil in Dracula's coffin, some eternal, some entirely of del Toro's own invention. Restored as recently as 2024, Cronos continues in this vein to make ancient legend seem new again: it certainly doesn't seem dated at a moment when certain American billionaires are recycling their own bodily fluids in a bid to stick around longer and witness the full extent of the destruction their capitalism has wrought. As del Toro has long understood, we have no need to invent ghouls when so many walk amongst us.

Cronos is now showing in selected cinemas, available to rent via the BFI Player, and on Blu-ray via the BFI.