CRONOS (Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Starring Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook, Tamra Shanath)

This is the story of a man called Jesus who dies and is resurrected on the third day, yet despite an abundance of Catholic imagery in this imaginative Mexican film, it could hardly be described as a religious tract. For this Jesus is neither the son of God, nor born again: he is undead.

As the release of Neil Jordan’s all star, big budget interpretation of Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire approaches, Guillermo Del Toro’s off-beat, low-budget metaphysical horror film reinterprets and reinvents the genre with style, taste and vision. After a fairly hokey introduction, in which a B-movie voice over introduces us to the alchemical Cronos device, which feeds on blood and delivers eternal life, Del Toro gently leads us into the life of sweet old antique dealer Jesus Gris (Frederico Luppi), whose discovery of the rejuvenating properties of the device leads him down the slippery slope of a grotesquely conjured up addiction, and finds him struggling between sinfulness and redemption.

There are no erotic undertones, no stakes through hearts and burning crosses, and no feasting on the necks of damsels. Instead what you get is probably the first vampire film in which the creature of the night sleeps in a toy box, licks blood off a toilet floor and phones his wife to tell her he loves her. It has an undercurrent of black comedy, but is too genuinely macabre for outright laughter, and builds through genuinely moving performances to an almost elegiac meditation on the quality of life.

The sheer confidence and originality of Del Toro’s debut movie suggests the emergence of a substantial talent. It is a horror film that shows sympathy for monsters, but not the devil. There is a clear line between good and evil at its core, it is just that the characters seem to stray between them. It could almost be the last temptation of Jesus, unless of course they bring him back from the dead for a sequel.