[7.6/10] The great thing about Guillermo del Toro’s films is that often they feel more like macabre fables than straight horror. Rather than attacking ghouls or horrible monsters, they feature supernatural creatures that are grayer, not explicitly good or evil, just the product or object of bad choices. What makes *Cronos* compelling is how thoroughly it follows that tack, where the combination of random chance and one bad choice in the name of vanity leads to a loss of humanity, and one final effort to hang onto it.

The film tells the story of Jesus Gris, the friendly but reserved owner of an antiques shop, who stumbles upon an ancient artifact that, unbeknownst to him, can grant eternal life, at a price. A chance prick from the sparkling golden device starts to change him, make him younger and more vibrant, but also gives him a terrible thirst. His possession of the item puts him in the crosshairs of the terminally ill, Howard Hughes-like recluse De la Guardia, who’s been searching for it for years in order to extend his life, as well as De la Guardia’s goon of a nephew/henchman, who handles the wetwork in the hopes of inheriting his uncle’s fortune.

Despite that setup, it is, slowly but surely, a monster movie. *Cronos* depicts Jesus gradually turning into a vampire, one with eternal life, an uncontrollable thirst for blood, cold pale skin, and an aversion to light. Del Toro, who both wrote and directed the piece, makes it an origin story of sorts, one that tells the tale of how a simple shop owner toyed with one of his antiques, and ended up turning into a creature of the night because of it.

There’s something engaging both in terms of narrative and terror there. I’ll admit that I didn’t piece together *Cronos*’s vampiric aims until late into the picture (basically not until he recoiled from the beams of light jolting into the attic). It’s clear early on that the artifact changes something elemental in Jesus, and that its initial salutary effect gives way to something more sinister or troubling. But there’s an “aha!” moment when everything snaps into place, that is as joyful as it is horrifying.

In the film’s mythos, vampires (or their equivalents) are the product of an alchemist trying to gain immortality. To achieve that, he builds the device that causes all this trouble, and contains within it an insect, one that acts as a living filter. There’s something clever about tying the vampire mythology to our entomological friends. The dormancy and revival, the blood-sucking, even being drawn to and repulsed by light connects the movie’s transformed protagonists to the six-legged creatures who crawl out of the product of the alchemist’s work in the film’s first big scare.

But that’s not its last. *Cronos* is awash in excellent body horror and impressively gross consequences from Jesus’s descent. The way del Toro focuses on his protagonist lapping blood up off the floor is positively disgusting but drives home the dark side of his renewed vigor in a visceral fashion. The very mechanisms of the device itself -- piercing the skin, whirring with gears, convulsing its operator, revealing a slimy bug inside -- evince the physically disturbing and underscore the deal with the devil that Gris is making. And the physical decay of Jesus, as his skin peels off, he reaches inside his own abdomen, and gradually looks more and more monstrous after the attempts on his life, create a visual anchor for what is an internal transformation as much as it’s an external one.

In that, del Toro presents a cautionary tale. There’s a self-conscious fixation on regaining youth, staving off death, straining to freeze or reverse the effects of aging. Jesus develops an addiction to the artifact’s revivifying power. De la Guardia wants to reverse his own impending demise. Even Angel, the dopey-if-brutal eighties guy of a henchman, is minorly obsessed with plastic surgery and making himself look and feel the way he wants. True to the film’s name, there’s repeated imagery that evokes the tick tick tick of the clock, from the internal mechanisms of the device itself, to Jesus as the owner of a clock shop, to the giant electric sign that features a watch face, the stage for the film’s final battle. And in contrast to it all, it’s a deliberately paced film, one that lets scenes linger so we feel every tactile, oft-disturbing second of that journey.

It’s a journey that leads all of these men to ruin. De la Guardia falls to Jesus’s diminutive protector (whose lack of hesitation in defense is smartly established in the first bug scene), and eventually at the hands (er, foot) of his own kin, after searching for this item for so long and scheming to rob someone of it. Angel’s wanton murders are turned around on him, his brutality and plans to assume his uncle’s wealth falling to nothing but his own end. And Jesus’s simple effort to take advantage of his golden artifact and its seeming renewal reveal him to be tampering with that which he does not understand, and paying the price for it.

But only Jesus is granted a measure of grace and redemption, one tied to Aurora, Jesus’s granddaughter and one of the many innocents who populates del Toro’s work. In a moment of supreme weakness, having using his new abilities to defeat the film’s antagonists, he lays eyes on Aurora, as blood drips from her tiny hand. In the film’s tensest, most frightening moment, he starts to reach for her, to sate his aching hunger, a living metaphor for the old sustaining themselves by draining the young. It is a scene of pathos, or uncontrolled horrors overtaking the things that made Jesus a human being.

And yet, at the last moment he recovers himself, choosing a noble death of peace and protection for his loved ones over an eternal life that would reduce him to this. He crushes the device, the thing that holds fast his tie to this mortal world, and dies in the embrace of the wife he loves and the child that saved him, in more ways than one.

There is a moral in that, which speaks to the ugly products of resisting the natural passage of time, the connections to those close to us that allow us to have life and not mere persistence, and the tempting, dehumanizing allure of the things which promise to restore us to what we once were. A man unwraps a device, one cased in a fallen angel, and his whole world and self come tumbling down from the turn of its levers and gears. And still, it’s not a tale of a monster from without, but rather a warning and a struggle against a monster from within.