A mysterious mechanical object offers life-giving vitality – but with macabre consequences – in the Mexican maestro’s steampunkish body-horror comedy

Guillermo del Toro’s feature debut from 1992 is a work regarded by many as an early masterpiece, featuring the director’s key repertory players Federico Luppi and Ron Perlman. Yet for all its wit and strangeness, this film underscores my feeling I am not fully part of the Del Toro true believer fanbase. I find myself restive at the elaborate, intricate but sometimes slightly inert visual contrivances, though I have always enjoyed his films, perhaps especially his remake of Nightmare Alley.

Cronos is a macabre body-horror comedy, perhaps more intriguing than frightening, with a hint of steampunkiness; it looks almost like a feature-length pilot for some cult TV show that never got made. There is a faintly perfunctory prologue sequence about an “alchemist” in the 16th century who invented the Cronos, a device with the complex mechanism of a watch, but which has a kind of immortal insect-creature within it whose body evidently extrudes magical liquid that can be implanted into the body of the owner via tiny metal stingers which emerge from the Cronos’s sides.