"Cabinet of Rares": Guillermo del Toro invented a cunmoster series for Netflix

Anthology of horror from the Mexican visionary, who received the approval of Stephen King himself

Netflix entered the anthology of the horror “Cabinet of Rares”, produced by the famous Mexican visitor Guillermo del Toro. Each of the eight episodes of the project has its own director: these are the authors of Twilight, Mandy, Babaduka and other famous paintings. The film critic Anton Dolin tells why the legacy of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and which episodes can be called the real pearl of the series is especially important for the “Cabinet”.

This is the year Guillermo del Toro. Having withstand a noticeable pause after the Oscar Triumph “Forms of Water”, the Mexican visitor released at the junction of 2021 and 2022 “The Alley of Nightsmares” (it does not matter that the film was accepted without enthusiasm-the director carried out a long-standing idea), and in December the animated “Pinocchio” will be released, about which Del Toro also dreamed for many years. Between the two so different works, especially to Halloween, the prolific author released his curatorial work on Netflix - the “Cabinet of Rares”. Here he plays a role once played by Alfred Hitchcock: presents other people's paintings in which he took a production participation.

Despite this, the presence of Del Toro is noticeable in the films immediately, and not only because the two episodes - the first (Lot 36) and the last (“Murmuration”) - were shot according to its original plots. The director meets us in front of the credits, conducting mini-excursions on inexhaustible treasures of his “Cabinet of Rares”-Kunstkamers hidden in a carved cabinet with many boxes. It is obvious that the retrodukh of the project, sending the audience to a cozy and carefully stylized, spaced-filled the past, refers to the author’s universe del Toro (and one of the series-directly to the “Koshmara alley”). This is the same cabinet with secrets.

It is no coincidence that almost half of the short stories is ideologically and aesthetically connected with the prose of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose “ridges of madness” del Toro has been trying in vain about ten years now. And the two episodes are direct, albeit noticeably departing from the original sources, the film adaptation of famous Lovecraft stories, “Model for the Picman” and “Dreams in the Witches House”.

Del Toro himself selected the directors, and in his ideas an obviously biased and personal attitude to the material. A touching fact: before each series, he takes out and puts a small director of the director on the table, thus saying a rare attention to the directors rare for television projects. The first in the gallery is the “Lot 36” Guillermo Navarro, the long -term operator Del Toro (Hellboy, Labyrinth Favna, and so on). This approach is vulnerable to the fact that the quality of eight mini-films is different. However, there are no frank failures among them, everyone is at least something, but interesting.

The first two novels are instructive horror stories, a kind of fable about men who imagined too many and fallen victims of their sins. In Lot 36, Tim Blake Nelson plays an rationed rogue who redeems the warehouse of the deceased old man and discovers that he was a Nazi-Oxultist in the past. In the “Cemetery rats”, staged by Canadian Vincenzo Natalie (“Cube”, “Chimera”), David Hughlett organically fit into the image of a watchman-marauds, robbing rich graves and entering into an unequal confrontation with the hordes of rodents. Both stories are canonical and predictable, slightly more original, the third episode, “autopsy” made by David Predoror and markedly won due to acting, habitually the grandiose F. Murray Abrahams.

Two novels in Lovecraft convey one of the favorite ideas of the ancestor of the chorror of the twentieth century: what seems to us like a wild fantasy may well be realism - simply reflecting the part of life that we did not know about. But this sound thought is boringly visualized, especially in “Dreams in the Witches House”, where Katherine Hardwick (Twilight) called Rupert Grint to the main role. The boy has long matured, but Ron Weasley is still accurately recognized in his features, and the uninvited spirit of Harry Potter does not allow the viewer to take a terrible fairy tale seriously. As for the “model for Picman”, Kita Thomas (“igniting gaze”), then a great painter-Bezuma came out of Chrispin Glover, but his infernal paintings, alas, are more impressive for other characters in the film than its spectators.

Pano Cosmatos, the Guru Art-Corror, whose Mandy and Nicholas Cage, found a cult status already at the premiere show in Cannes approached the heritage of Lovecraft. His “viewing” is atmospheric, minimalist and little to a similar narcotic trip that the mysterious tycoon (Peter Weller) shares with his famous guests: astrophysicist, musician, writer and psychic. We can do without spoilers about what happened to them next.

The most talented and memorable novels were removed by women. The “outer side” of the American Iranki Ana Lily Amirpur (“The girl goes home at night”) is an amazing and really terrible, but funny story about a bank secretary who dreams of fit into the team. Kate Mikuchchi (“The Big Bang Theory”) with inspiration and enthusiastically plays the transformation of a woman under the psychotropic influence of expensive care cosmetics. The real pearl of the series is the “murmuration” of Australian Jennifer Kent (“Babadk”). A quiet and piercing drama about a pair of amateur ornithologists who have lost a year earlier, only slightly painted in the colors of the horror. This little parable about loneliness, living in grief and healing secrets of nature resembles restrained power not other genre samples, but Jonathan Franzen's prose.

The horror film is an inexhaustible genre, the creative energy of Guillermo del Toro seems to be inexhaustible. So it remains to dream that his series, who received enthusiastic reviews of critics and approval of Stephen King himself, returned every year.

Anton Dolin