Cronos

[Sweder]

I finally got around to watching Cronos, the first of the Guillermo Del Toro trilogy recently landed from Amazon and a film offering an unusual angle on the age-old Vampire theme. An intriguing if ultimately disappointing film, Cronos is the story of Jesús Gris, an aged antiques dealer who chances upon a most unusual artefact. The large golden scarab, secreted in the pedestal of an angel’s statue, turns out to be more than decorative. It houses an immortal creature with a corporeal thirst, leading to a reversal of the ageing process in the victim and a sequence of dark and unfortunate events for those around him.

In keeping with other examples of Del Toro’s work – El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) and El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) – many of the key moments are witnessed by, or feature, children, in this case Gris's eight-year-old grand-daughter Mercedes. Del Toro seems to relish using children to present his themes in an unusual, sometimes visceral light, and more often than not this works. Cronos is a rare failure. The ever-presence of Mercedes serves only to heighten the discomfort of the viewer (you’re not entirely sure why she’s there or, as a result, where the film is heading). At one point, when Jesús, by this time quite obviously in the vampiric grip of the eponymous device, starts to smoulder in the morning sunlight, the child helps him to hide in her toy box, settling the human leech down with one of her favourite teddy bears. OK, so there’s little doubt Cronos is intended to be funny, albeit black-as-night humour. Despite my desire to love all things Del Toro I simply could not embrace this awkward juxtaposition of japery and darkness. If you want definitive evidence of blood and laughter failing to mix, throw some of your life away on Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

Ron Pearlman imposes his trademark bully-boy style as the thuggish underling instructed by his crippled master (played to the edge of extreme hammery by Claudio Brook) to track down and ‘obtain’ the artefact. Again, not Pearlman’s finest work but strangely in keeping with the off key tone of the film.

Despite one or two excellent set pieces and some imaginative cinematography I was left feeling I’d seen a poor man’s take on The Hunger, a vastly superior example of the genre made some ten years earlier. David Bowie (playing opposite a mesmeric Catherine Deneuve and a sultry Susan Sarandon) ages sixty years in ten minutes, giving perhaps the finest performance by a rock star in a movie since, er, David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. It seems churlish to suggest that Tony Scott (Top Gun, Days of Thunder) could produce a better film than the feted Spanish maestro, but that is, in this instance, the unpalatable truth.