Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993)

Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993)

Cast: Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook, Margarita Isabel, Tamara Shanath, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mario Iván Martínez, Farnesio de Bernal, Juan Carlos Colombo. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Production design: Tolita Figuero. Film editing: Raúl Dávalos. Music: Javier Álvarez.

Guillermo del Toro's Cronos, his first feature, is a "horror movie" with the hard moral clarity of a folk tale, a characteristic the writer-director has maintained into his more celebrated films like Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017). In fact, I think I prefer Cronos to these later films because its moral vision is not distracted into social or political directions. Granted, we can interpret Cronos as a tale about the cultural contamination of Mexico from the age of the conquistadors to the age of multinational corporations, but that takes more work than the film itself demands. What we have in Cronos is a fable about the hunger for immortality, as basic as it is to any vampire movie, but with the difference that in this film the vampirism, with its blood lust and photophobia, isn't spread in the usual plaguelike fashion, but confined to those eager enough to seek it out. The fable of the consequences of human overreaching, as old as Genesis, gets a fairly sophisticated reworking in Cronos, where the horror movie tropes are more insidiously displayed than usual. Del Toro is less out to shock us than to infest our dreams.

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)

Leticia: Silvia Pinal
Edmundo Nobile: Enrique Rambal
Steward: Claudio Brook
Leandro Gomez: José Baviera
Doctor: Augusto Benedico
Sergio Russell: Antonio Bravo
Alicia de Roc: Jacqueline Andere
Colonel: César de Campo
Silvia: Rosa Elena Durgel
Lucia de Nobile: Lucy Gallardo
Alberto Roc: Enrique García Álvarez
Juana Avila: Ofelia Guilmáin
Ana Maynar: Nadia Haro Oliva
Raúl: Tito Junco
Francisco Avila: Xavier Loyà
Eduardo: Xavier Massé
Beatriz: Ofelia Montesco
Cristián Ugalde: Luis Beristáin
Rita Ugalde: Patricia Morán
Blanca: Patricia de Morelos
Leonora: Bertha Moss

Director: Luis Buñuel
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Production design: Jesús Bracho
Film editing: Carlos Savage
Music: Raúl Lavista

The Exterminating Angel teeters occasionally on the brink of heavy-handed satire -- the sheep entering the now-blocked church at the film's end, for example -- but somehow Luis Buñuel always recovers his balance. I think it's because he knows that surrealism -- the movement which gave him birth -- must always be underpinned by a dutiful semi-documentary realism, that we must never be entirely sure whether the improbable characters we're encountering and the unlikely events we're witnessing are external to us or are products of our own unstable minds. Take the déjà vu effect near the beginning of the film, when we witness the guests arriving at the mansion of the Nobiles and ascending the staircase only to watch the same scene repeated almost immediately from a somewhat different angle. For a moment we wonder if the projectionist has put on the wrong reel or the film editor has forgotten to excise the repeated scene. Or perhaps we wonder if we dozed off for a second and missed something that would explain the repetition. But no, the director must be playing with us, we conclude. That, or we're trapped in his own world, just as he is to trap the guests inside a room later, never bothering to provide an explanation of the force that keeps them there. It's one of those tricks that can only work in the movies, where we, like the house guests, have gathered and found themselves unable to escape. We can choose to escape from the experience The Exterminating Angel presents to us -- nothing prevents us from leaving the theater or turning off the video -- but we don't. So there's much to be said for the observation that the house guests are us, that Buñuel's point is not just that the Spanish bourgeoisie of the Franco years were seething in their own corruption and inertia, but also that we are all trapped by something in our psyches and/or societies that limits and lames us.