Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities Is a Horror Anthology Haunted By Creative Freedom: Review
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The post Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities Is a Horror Anthology Haunted By Creative Freedom: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: A racist scavenger (Tim Blake Nelson) uncovers the ultimate score in the storage locker of a dead Nazi. A desperate grave robber (David Hewlett) gets more than he bargained for on his latest excursion. A medical examiner (F. Murray Abraham) autopsies a dead body from a mine explosion and finds a passenger hiding within the flesh. An awkward, frumpy bank teller (Kate Micucci) is tempted with the secrets of beauty by a mysterious skin cream.
An art student in 1909 (Ben Barnes) grows obsessed with the horrific paintings of a strange new colleague (Crispin Glover). A desperate man (Rupert Grint) searches for his dead twin sister through the veil of spiritualism. A reclusive billionaire (Peter Weller) gathers a group of illustrious talents to view his latest otherworldly find. And a pair of married ornithologists (Essie Davis and Andrew Lincoln) stare down the white-hot pain of past tragedies, carried along the wind by birdsong.
These are the treasures hidden within Guillermo del Toro’s “cabinet of curiosities,” so named for the pre-Enlightenment collections of oddities curated by luminaries and madmen in the days before we understood the order of nature. Eight stories, helmed by filmmakers handpicked by del Toro and given the complete creative control (and boatloads of money) Netflix has to offer.
I Collect the Unknown: The TV horror anthology is hardly a new idea; from The Twilight Zone to The Outer Limits to Tales From the Crypt, we’re all profoundly familiar with the stomach-churning delights of short-form scares beamed into our cerebellums, often by significant luminaries of the genre on break from their bigger projects.
Cabinet of Curiosities follows in that throbbing, pulsating vein but benefits from the aforementioned feature-quality largesse of a prominent streamer and the magnanimous generosity of the big name above the title. Del Toro, who’s long since carved a place atop the mountain of our most venerated filmmakers (in horror or any other mode), clearly adores the creatives he’s tapped to helm all eight of these hour-long stories.
Apart from their production design — all were designed with handcrafted care by del Toro stalwart Tamara Deverell (Nightmare Alley) — each has its own cinematographer, editor, composer, and so on, many of whom are the filmmaker’s regular collaborators. Really, del Toro just loves these people’s work and wanted to give them a platform to play with mountains of Netflix money unencumbered. (All he has to do is saunter in from the darkness to introduce each segment, pulling a new ivory likeness of each director out of the clockwork mansion model he stands next to.)
Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Netflix)
One of Those Nightmare Specials: The results, for the most part, are delightful. And while there aren’t any outright bad stories in the bunch, there are some clear standouts from the pack. Vincenzo Natali’s “Graveyard Rats” is a suitably misanthropic yarn that plays with the sympathies of graverobbers — it’s a lot of fun, as our sadsack Masson (Hewlett, a longtime friend of Natali’s and one of Canada’s most underappreciated treasures) crawls through an ever-tightening series of tunnels, fending off animatronic rat kings and legless ghouls.
Same goes for Panos Cosmatos’ “The Viewing,” as he soaks us once again in the lava-lamp saturation and acid-burn aesthetics of Mandy and Beyond the Black Rainbow, lending the parched-dry humor of the script, penned by Cosmatos and Aaron Stewart-Ahn, an extra layer of absurdity. (You haven’t lived till you’ve seen Peter Weller snort a veritable quarter-cup of space cocaine.)
The real standout is Jennifer Kent’s “The Murmuring,” a patient, mournful tale that eschews the Grand Guignol delights of the other entries for something more genuinely haunting. Nancy (Davis) reels from the death of her child a year prior, her bird-centric scholarship only barely wallpapering over the freshness of that pain, especially as their fellow male academics reserve most of the praise for her unassuming, similarly anguished husband Edgar (Lincoln).
It’s a raw nerve the story (and its attending isolation) keeps plucking at to unsettling effect, anchored by turns so strong from both Davis and Lincoln you’ll forgive the occasional lapse in their affected American accents. There are ghosts, spooky birds, and whispered pleas from children long since dead in the black of night. But the real horror comes from Davis’ rapidly-unraveling protagonist and the impenetrable walls she erects against her husband to keep both of them from the catharsis they so badly need. It’s of a piece with del Toro’s Crimson Peak and holds up alongside any of Kent’s feature work.
Pity Poor Masson: They’re not all winners; sometimes, the sixty-minute mandate stretches some pieces beyond their intended life. Some stories, like Ana Lily Amirpour’s “The Outside” and Prior’s “The Autopsy,” suffer from stretching about thirty minutes of material into an hour, which takes away from otherwise nifty body horror and the filmmaker’s stylistic flourishes.
Granted, Amirpour compensates nicely with some macabre fish-eye photography and surreal work from Dan Stevens as a sentient infomercial salesman with a seductively strange Nordic accent. (Don’t forget how she calibrates Micucci’s singularly-adorkable screen presence, complete with a long-take grin at the screen that rivals Pearl’s end-credits smile.) But Prior’s work suffers from a formulaic script from David S. Goyer, turning a twisty bit of alien body horror into a mid-tier episode of The X-Files.
Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Netflix)
The rest are okay to pretty good. “Lot 36” coasts nicely off Tim Blake Nelson’s live-wire central performance and a great creature design at the end, though its final act feels rushed. Funny enough, the ones that moved the least were the ones most directly adapting the works of H.P. Lovecraft; Keith Thomas’ “Pickman’s Model,” which wastes a genuinely bizarre Crispin Glover turn on a been-there-done-that tale of Arkham horror, and Catherine Hardwicke’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” which goes on far too long and suffers from some fairly cheap effects (save for a gruesomely-designed witch who looks like she was carved out of tree bark).
The Verdict: Like any horror anthology, Cabinet of Curiosities is hardly perfect (it’d be boring if it were, frankly). But the misses are hardly unforgivable, and the hits are too entertaining to ignore. The central appeal should be the mere fact of its existence: That Netflix, a company at the vanguard of streaming (and potential steward of its downfall), still feels fit to let world-class filmmakers make merry play with their vast mountains of money, especially if a Big Name like del Toro will make a case for them.
The show feels as much a vehicle for scares as it does an anointed master of his craft elevating and celebrating the creators he loves — giving them the tools and freedom to go big, take chances, and make something the way they would want to.
Where’s It Playing? Netflix drops the first two tales of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities on October 25th, with new episodes airing weekly.
Trailer:
Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities Is a Horror Anthology Haunted By Creative Freedom: Review
Clint Worthington
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