Cronos

Saw Cronos (thanks, Basil!) It was emphatically directed by Guillermo Del Toro. One of his early films, it contains many of his hallmarks: elaborately made-up but sadly sympathetic monsters, silent little girls, a complex mythos, Ron Perelman. Yes, this one has it all. The story is one of those vampire films where they never actually say the word vampire, but there's a dude drinking blood and taking a lot of damage without dying. This film sort of returns the vampire image to its roots, a tormented old man with an addiction, struggling not to hurt people, tormented by what he must do to survive.

There's also the mixture of the innocent and the monstrous that Del Toro likes. Here the vampire protagonist curls up inside of his granddaughter's toy chest to sleep, as though dead, clutching dolls. A vital physical piece of the vamp-mythos is kept hidden inside of a teddy bear. Appropriately enough, the hole to get the thing out of the bear is in its neck.

I noticed a motif in the film of the passage of time. A climactic battle takes place in front of a clock. Pre-vampirism, the protagonist runs an antiques store. When he first discovers the vamp-ening magic, the clocks start chiming. The symbolism, that this guy is now stuck in place as time flowed around him, is obvious and apt. Less apt, I feel, is the weird late-stage symbolism connecting him to Jesus Christ. He does sacrifice himself for the greater good and his name is Jesus Gris (for heaven's sake.) I think the Jesus symbolism is a tad goofy.

That (subjective) misstep aside, this was a pretty solid film. One of the reasons I watch movies is to see things I would never otherwise have seen and I got that out of this film. It's a fun film. IT takes itself fairly seriously, but in a strange, off-kilter kind of way. The protagonist at one point licks up the aftermath of a nose-bleed in a men's room. He does this, but we also see him struggling with himself, fighting and then accepting this impulse. An interesting film.