Cabinet of Curiosities - Netflix - Guillermo del Toro
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Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities

November 3, 2022

Episode 1: “Lot 36”

Guillermo del Toro might be an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, but at heart he’s always been a fanboy. Part carnival barker, part collector, del Toro has never been embarrassed to put his love of old monster movies, HP Lovecraft, and anime front and center (he even has a second home full of memorabilia that he has made a short documentary about). He’s also channeled much of his success into boosting young, up-and-coming filmmakers, at this point having produced more films than he’s actually directed himself. An anthology series bearing his name is a no-brainer, then, allowing del Toro to oversee a variety of short films while also giving a platform to a bevy of genre-affiliated artists. The first entry in this Cabinet of Curiosities series is directed by Guillermo Navarro, del Toro’s frequent cinematographer and, more recently, an accomplished television director (notably several episodes of the beloved Hannibal series). Titled “Lot 36,” and co-written by del Toro from his own short story of the same name, the short begins in 1990 as George Bush’s New World Order speech plays on TV. An elderly man is vigorously chopping up some meat before suddenly dropping dead of a heart attack. Jumping ahead several months, the story picks up with the introduction of Nick Appleton (Tim Blake Nelson), a military vet who harbors some virulently racist ideas and makes ends meet by buying abandoned storage units at auction. He’s got a nice side hustle set up with one of the managers, Eddie (Demetrius Grosse), who tips him off to potentially lucrative units. Sure enough, Eddie has security camera footage of the now-deceased old man visiting the same unit every day for years on end, always arriving with a bag, staying for an hour or so, and then exiting with the same bag now emptied. What was he dropping off every day? Nick is desperate to find out, needing something of value to sell quickly and pay off the loan shark whose threats have turned violent. Meanwhile, a nice Latina woman who has fallen behind on her monthly payments returns to the facility to beg for her family heirlooms back; Eddie has already sold the contents of the unit to Nick, and when the woman asks Nick to return photo albums and letters — personal items with great sentimental but no monetary value — he cruelly rebukes her (and makes some racist remarks about learning to speak English, to boot). Nick eventually makes his way into the titular Lot 36, and finds photo albums revealing the old man as a one-time Nazi, as well as antique chairs, a candelabra, and an ornamental table with a very recognizable supernatural symbol inlaid on its top. This eventually leads Nick to an antiques dealer and then, finally, a specialist in the occult who knows very well exactly who that old man was. Spoiler alert: no one good.

This is an awful lot of plot for what amounts to about 45 minutes of screen time, and while it’s never boring, it also moves at an awkward clip. It’s not until after the halfway point that any supernatural intimations are even flirted with, let alone realized, and the grand mystery of what exactly is hiding in the unit is both introduced and revealed within minutes. Exposition is delivered in bursts, quickly covering whatever we need to know to move the story along. And while the whole thing is reasonably creepy, it’s never really scary. Yet there’s something here, an effort to link the sins of the past to the here and now. After all, early ’90s anti-immigration rhetoric, old-school Rush Limbaugh talk-radio bluster, Nazism, and cold-hearted capitalism that turns human emotions into dollars and cents are all still very much with us. Long sequences of Nick hauling junk from the unit out to a dumpster become a kind of metaphor for burying the past, but some things can’t remain hidden. This being a del Toro project, the production design is impeccable, of course. Navarro turns the storage facility into a maze of never-ending corridors, long rows of look-alike units shrouded in dim light. A prickly Nelson gives a fine performance as the epitome of white rage, a man angry at a country that has taken everything from him and fearful of a future that does not include him, and one who in his hubris and greed awakens something darker than he could imagine. There’s an unfortunately pat moral that arrives at the end, an ironic bit of finger-wagging that feels out of sync with the cosmic horror we’ve just witnessed, but overall “Lot 36” marks an auspicious beginning to del Toro’s latest project.

Writer: Daniel Gorman 


Episode 2: “Graveyard Rats”

In “Graveyard Rats,” the second installment of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, Masson (David Hewlett), a professional grave robber, makes a last-ditch attempt to pay off some hefty debts by retrieving a particularly valuable artifact from the recently deceased. Trouble is, per the title, the graveyard in which he plies his trade is overrun by some very determined rats, among other things. It’s a fittingly brisk setup for what’s essentially a short creature feature, rife with potential for some economical blood-letting. But beyond the impressive squick factor of this Vincenzo Natali-helmed entry, “Graveyard Rats” is an utterly banal experience, devoid of even a single novel development. Matters are only made worse by the episode’s cornball sense of O. Henry-ish irony and some terrible writing.

Natali manages to bring very little to the show other than a drably grey digital intermediate to the period setting. Instead, the real stars here are the thousands and thousands of rats and the gorgeous animatronic VFX that follow them once Masson delves deep enough into their lair. Though the episode is based on a short story by acclaimed genre writer Henry Kuttner, one might suspect that the sole reason for being here is to deliver a bunch of yucky rat stuff — if that’s the case, mission accomplished. The effects work is genuinely superb, and the gags are sufficiently… gag-inducing.

Unfortunately, the rest of the story is entirely perfunctory and deeply corny. Hewlett is particularly bad as Masson, spouting a bunch of flowery dialogue in a shout-for-the-rafters over-enunciation that smells vaguely of bad theater. Perhaps the intent is to characterize him as an in-over-his-head dummy putting on airs, but it all just winds up a distracting miscalculation. Worse still are the clumsy stabs at careful-what-you-wish-for irony; it’s the kind of thing that’s polluted genre anthology fare for decades: obvious moral lessons rolled up in derivative premises. Even the beloved original Twilight Zone couldn’t avoid that, but at least that seemed novel at the time (setting aside the vastly superior craft). In the end, this is just another undernourishing, understylized horror exercise. You’ll forget about it before it’s even over.

Writer: Matt Lynch


Episode 3: “The Autopsy”

Of all the directors chosen for Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, David Prior might just be the hippest choice. Prior, formerly known only for shooting home video featurettes for David Fincher movies, has but one feature under his belt, 2020’s The Empty Man, which was dumped into theaters at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and largely ignored until a cult formed around its DVD release. That film immediately made Prior someone to watch: its ambitious structure and scope, combined with an aesthetic somewhere between Fincher and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, presented a take on cosmic horror that was as thoughtful as it was scary.

His short for Del Toro’s anthology, “The Autopsy,” certainly shares a number of The Empty Man’s strengths. It is once again a horror story concerned with identity, death, and the grand cosmos. Its setting in a Pennsylvania mining town further reveals Prior’s interest in rusted American industry and the milieu surrounding it. And, while it definitely doesn’t shy away from the gory, scary bits, the bulk of the hour is more invested in procedure and conversation. Where The Empty Man was expansive and constantly surprising, “The Autopsy” struggles to move beyond the obvious in its slight frame.

The story concerns a coroner (F. Murray Abraham) called in by the local sheriff to conduct autopsies on the bodies of miners killed in the bombing that opens the episode. Ostensibly, his findings — whether or not the miner’s deaths count as job-related — will decide whether the victims’ families will collect money. In flashbacks to the sheriff’s investigation, the explosion is revealed to be the work of a man who has killed before and who, in all likelihood, is no man at all. del Toro’s own introduction to the episode cues the audience into the story’s concern with extraterrestrial life, so it becomes a foregone conclusion what exactly is going on here.

But “The Autopsy” plods along from these flashbacks to the autopsy itself, where Dr. Winters cuts into the victims and reports his findings, all while something sinister begins to slowly reveal itself. Without much in the way of shock, Prior relies on the dread of the inevitable to inject tension, as the episode builds to the doctor’s confrontation with dangerous alien life. And so, while he’s certainly a skilled horror filmmaker, and his attempts to frighten fare better than most of the genre work on platformed on Netflix, the slow build to the finale can’t help but underwhelm given how much time is spent recapping what was already obvious in the film’s cold open. Eventually, the gory finale proves to be suitably gross — though the CGI effects and the generally slick sheen of the cinematography detract — and philosophically compelling, but it doesn’t rise to a cumulative effect that makes the preceding slog feel worth it. Never mind that little of what “The Autopsy” has to offer is especially novel, either in regards to its themes or its more base scares. “The Autopsy” isn’t necessarily deserving of the dreaded “elevated horror” epithet, but it’s still hard to shake that what it does offer is basically just The Hidden but stripped of all of its fun.

Writer: Chris Mello


Episode 4: “The Outside”

Ana Lily Amirpour’s foray into prestige television isn’t entirely unexpected, given both her affinity with idiosyncratic, highly stylized horror cinema and a cultural demand for precisely this affinity, as best exemplified in Guillermo del Toro’s latest Netflix miniseries. Cabinet of Curiosities, consisting of eight episodes, seeks to “blur” the “line between what is outside and what is inside” — between the “images and voices in the dark” and those “in our head” — as del Toro so proffers in his preamble to Amirpour’s episode, “The Outside.” This already serves, in a way, as a tantalizingly metafictive commentary on the insidiously transformative and possibly manipulative potency of the image, its reflection of our deep desires and insecurities, as well as the very ability to manufacture them. “The Outside” begins with a simple premise, of a woman named Stacey (Kate Micucci) who works at a bank but doesn’t feel like she fits in with her female colleagues. While the worldly and buxom women gossip over such trendy-hot topics as male impotence and midlife boredom, and complain that their sex lives aren’t as illustrious as the sensationalist affairs of others, Stacey’s world is thoroughly desexualized. She snuggles in front of the TV on stormy nights, and with her husband Keith (Martin Starr), a police officer, but their intimacy is — as far as we can tell — almost platonic.

And so, an insecurity about the body sets in, which is in turn remedied by an image of physical newness and sensual proclivity. Stacey, invited for the first time to a Secret Santa party by one of her coworkers, tries out the trendy, skin-rejuvenating Alo Glo, but embarrassingly develops a rash in front of all in attendance. Despite or because of this embarrassment, she finds herself compelled to overcome the social barrier between herself and the wider world; the television, whether by its own accord or with the aid of hallucination, speaks to her directly and prompts her to embark on an Alo Glo regimen. Slathering her face and body with never-ending cream, Stacey internalizes a Nietzschean philosophy of resistance and will and subscribes, with deadly consequences, to the idea that “it gets worse before it gets better”; that the very itches she endures are, indeed, markers of healing and progress.

What ensues is generally what you’d expect out of an anthology bit: thematic fixation, coupled with oversized metaphors and acts of vengeance or redemption (or both). For Amirpour, whose best work dealt with issues of femininity and sexual commodification under boldly expunged settings (spaghetti Western vampirism in the Islamic Republic, capitalism’s desert of the Real, etc.), “The Outside” very much feels like a step down both tonally and narratively. Based on a short story by comic author Emily Carroll, the episode keeps a respectful distance from the radical notions of seeing (and being seen) it represents on screen rather conservatively, capitulating to a commonplace dialectic of appearance versus reality, outward attraction versus inner beauty. Micucci’s performance, splendid given her typecasting as awkward and insecure while not a wholly abject introvert, nonetheless evokes more pastiche than originality, with Sally Hawkins’ mute Elisa from del Toro’s The Shape of Water springing to mind here. All that being said, “The Outside” still holds up under its conditions of production, in large part due to the fuzzy, indeterminate temporality and spatiality it posits; are Alo Glo and television the consumer culture of its ostensible eighties, or reminiscent of the suburban conformity of Mad Men’s fifties, or instead belonging to a nostalgia twice removed — us reimagining the eighties as a longing for the earlier, airbrushed fifties? Are Stacey’s corporeal anxieties more intertwined with America’s materialist Christmas complex or do they befit the series’ own Halloween imaginary of the irreducibly unknown? One can certainly ask these questions, but “The Outside,” somewhat disappointingly, opts for text over subtext, coating its metaphors in conspicuous, viscous gel.

Writer: Morris Yang


Episode 5: “Pickman’s Model”

The fifth installment in Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is “Pickman’s Model,” inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft story of the same name and directed by Keith Thomas. After a promising feature debut with Jewish horror film The Vigil, an atmospheric, claustrophobic piece of chamber horror, Thomas’ follow-up, an uninspiring Firestarter reboot, proved deeply disappointing. With “Pickman’s Model,” Thomas treads new thematic ground, telling the story of a skilled but shallow painter, William Thurber (Ben Barnes), whose encounters with the bizarre and enigmatic Richard Pickman (Crispin Glover) and his terrifying artworks leave Thurber reeling, unable to shake the demonic presences that come to life within the paintings.

Lovecraft is not a writer who lends himself easily to adaptation. His stories thrive on a reader’s imagination, on the near-unimaginable threat of beings so ancient and eldritch that they are beyond human comprehension — to visualize them is, most times, to immediately rob them of some of that potency. “Pickman’s Model” does a mixed job of taking on the challenge. The art design of the film shines, with a vast array of macabre, show-stopping paintings, animated by the feverish intensity of Glover’s performance. The paintings stand in stark contrast to Thomas’ initially bright, airy landscapes, offering a glimpse of a world entirely different than the one Thurber inhabits, and lend the film a palpable sense of Pickman’s fear, revulsion, and fascination with their subjects. The practical effects, led by Mike Hill, are largely just as precise and lovingly crafted as one might expect from any project bearing Guillermo del Toro’s name, but they are shown so unrestrainedly that there is none of the incomprehensibility of Lovecraft to be found; the “model” at the center of the film is entirely legible. Similarly, Lee Patterson’s screenplay, which stretches the brief Lovecraft tale and adds additional details and characters to Thurber’s life, seems unable to deal with that which it cannot comprehend. Left with the challenge of finding a more satisfying ending than the original tale, “Pickman’s Model” settles into a fairly predictable arc of tragedy, drawing on imagery from film (specifically, The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby in some of its dream sequences) and invoking the classics with his allusion to the tale of Procne, instead of venturing into newer, riskier, more uncanny ground. Patterson does embrace the Lovecraftian tendency to leave questions unanswered, but the third act rushes to its conclusion so quickly that the script feels unassured, and leaves a lot to be desired.

The key animating force of “Pickman’s Model” is a return to the directorial ambition that Thomas showcased in his debut feature. While a lot of his signature flourishes are included here — the man seems unable to resist framing his actors in corridors in tense moments, in particular, creating a visual trap around them as the narrative one falls into place — there are active moves toward new territory as well. Thomas’ lighting is thoughtful, used first sparingly, candlelight flickering over Pickman’s oil paintings in such a way as to make the paint itself appear to writhe under its glow, illuminating their terrors glimpse by glimpse. Thomas loses that restraint when he makes the bold decision to film some of his horror scenes in daylight, a notoriously difficult feat that the director doesn’t quite pull off. Even in its failures, though, to see Thomas taking big swings again is a delight, and if “Pickman’s Model” isn’t exactly a smashing success in its own right, it at least might be indicative of more exciting and original moves to come.

Writer: Molly Adams


Episode 6: “Dreams in the Witch House”

Of the eight directors drafted to the roster of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, Catherine Hardwicke may be the oddest choice. Technically, she does have one feature horror film to her name — the ludicrous Red Riding Hood, which only succeeds in re-asserting the director’s facility with zeitgeisty indie soundtracks — but little else in her filmography recommends her for such a project. Her early career works include over-esteemed sub-Van Sant films like Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, while the past decade is a hodgepodge of genre-jumping, including a low-budget erotic thriller (Plush), a generic rom-com-dram (Miss You Already), and an actioner remake (Miss Bala). 

And then there’s the strange case of Twilight, a franchise Hardwicke commenced with a distinctly grimy oddball energy, spinning the relatively modest budget ($37 million; the final film in the series would cost $136 million) of this would-be tentpole film into a bizarrely lo-fi and entirely po-faced exercise in winceworthy YA angst. It’s the only film in her career that demonstrates any sense of real personality, and even if that amounts to what’s essentially a feature-length cringe compilation — the baseball sequence might be the most awkward few minutes in cinema history — that only a certain kind of viewer will be inclined to appreciate, it does suggest the potential for Hardwicke to thrive in the unapologetic genre territory of something like Cabinet of Curiosities

She does not. Her contribution, “Dreams in the Witch House,” follows Walter (Rupert Grint), a man obsessed with reconnecting with his dead sister, Epperley. In the short’s opening sequence, Walter witnesses his sister dragged into some netherworld dubbed the Forest of Lost Souls upon her death, and as an adult he’s taken to traveling the world o’er to take in all manner of supernatural acts in hopes that he’ll find the real thing and at last return his beloved sister to the world of the living. Following a tip, he rents a room in the ancestral home of an executed witch, Keziah Mason, and ingests some ayahuasca-esque drug that’s supposed to, and indeed does, take him to the Forest. Jenkins Brown, Mason’s familiar who happens to be a massive rat with a hilarious CGI human face, is also scampering around the proceedings, just for a little added flavor. 

Of course, what follows Walter’s trips to the Forest is some narrative bluster about balancing the scales, a sacrifice that must be made for Epperley to return, etc., but it’s all so generically devised that there are no interesting threads to follow. The short’s attempts to invoke the human horror of Salem are drowned amidst Hardwicke’s banal notions of horror plotting and visuals, and while some of the images she delivers are striking on pause, the cumulative aesthetic character isn’t helped by the cosplay gloss slathered all over the final product, stripping it of any potential for legitimate period reconstruction or gothic texture. Grint is actually a decent enough vessel to funnel this vision through, his everyman quality and mug of perpetual surprise lending a center to the rabbit hole histrionics swirling around him, but there simply isn’t enough substance or style here to spin into anything remotely terrifying or compelling. 

For further evidence of the short’s anonymous quality, one need look no further than its source material: “Dreams in the Witch House” is based on an H.P. Lovecraft story of the Cthulhu Mythos, one in which Epperley doesn’t exist and Walter is a student of both mathematics and folklore, drawn to Mason’s home due to its attic which seems to conform to a strange, non-Euclidean geometry. Confoundingly, Hardwicke and screenwriter Mika Watkins have made the decision to forego this specific narrative uncanniness and refashion the story into an overly familiar grief tale, stripping their adaptation of most of the author’s cosmicism and all of his Old Weird inflections, offering only generic scraps of dark fairy tale in the wake. The last thing a horror anthology series needs, particularly one platformed on a streaming service designed for binge consumption, is a bland mishmash of tired genre signifiers packaged with flattened aesthetics and middle school thematizing, but that’s exactly what Hardwicke has here delivered.

Writer: Luke Gorham


Episode 7: “The Viewing”

Spelled out in a brusque, harried introduction by Cabinet of Curiosities orchestrator Guillermo Del Toro (maybe 10% invested in his Hitchcockian hosting duties), Panos CosmatosThe Viewing is a cautionary tale, warning against the entitlements of the collector mentality in arch, gruesome fashion. But, in keeping with what we’ve seen from Cosmatos thus far (2010’s Beyond the Black Rainbow and 2018’s Mandy), plotting and theme are mostly working in service of the Greek-American auteur’s pronounced aesthetic, which has anchored and defined each project across his sparse, decade-plus career. This is the case with most of The Viewing’s other written elements, with characters and dialogue building from stilted trope and archetype to lend further credence to the production’s chic B-movie stylings, and provide plausible ironic cover by a cast of culty comedians (Eric André, Charlene Yi, and Steve Agee). A dubious “style over substance” proposition in many ways, Cosmatos’ dedication to this singular pursuit of heavy, ominous synths (provided by Daniel Lopatin this time around) and scuzzy analog psychedelia still holds some charm and intrigue that may just carry The Viewing over. 

Returning to the murky celluloid grain of Beyond the Black Rainbow, after going Arri Alexa mode for Mandy, The Viewing sends the aforementioned trio of comedic actors (along with Michael Therriault) into the impressive retro-futurist compound of reclusive illuminati figure Lionel Lassiter (sci-fi icon Peter Weller, inherited from Cosmatos’ filmmaker dad George P. who he worked with on Unknown Origin and Leviathan) who has promised to show them all something beyond belief. Each an expert in their respective fields (Yi a scientist, André a record producer, Agee a fiction writer), Lassiter seems eager to invite these people into his company so as to “collect” them and employ their talents exclusively, but also maybe to help him determine the purpose and origin of a mysterious rock-like object that confounds scientific classification. It’s a familiar yet not unappealing setup that savvily keeps the proceedings to a couple brutalist interiors, and it’s fun to go along with Cosmatos’ vision for a time, but things begin to unravel quickly once he attempts to pull his two narrative strands together. Affording about ¾ of the episode’s 57-minute runtime to talky pulp banter before inelegantly pivoting into Lovecraftian apocalyptic horror, The Viewing doesn’t really satisfy, its climax offering some uniquely grotesque imagery that almost acquits the production, but also recasting much of the build-up as meandering and indulgent. Indeed, as initially suggested, Cosmatos’ glossed-up reimagining of late-’70’s grindhouse aesthetics still holds its pleasures and is at its most vividly rendered here, but The Viewing isn’t offering much more than a vibe that’s somewhat diminished by the presence of familiar Hollywood faces.

Writer: M.G. Mailloux


Episode 8: “The Murmuring”

Over the course of its initial eight episodes, Guillermo del Toro’s The Cabinet of Curiosities has proven to be wildly eclectic in its subject matter — Lovecraftian creatures, grungy subterranean rats, gloopy body horror, drug-induced psychedelia, and even aliens have all made appearances. But of course, producer/mastermind del Toro would want at least one installment to feature an old-fashioned ghost story. Enter The Murmuring, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, adapting del Toro’s own short story. Kent is well known for The Babadook, arguably ground zero (along with It Follows and The Witch) for the modern “elevated horror” phenomenon. In a nice bit of creator synchronicity, The Murmuring fits just as neatly into Kent’s (admittedly small) oeuvre as it does del Toro’s; after all, The Babadook and follow-up The Nightingale are just as interested in mother-child dynamics and the hopelessness of a woman trapped in patriarchal society being deemed “psychotic” or “unstable” as they are in thrills and chills. The Murmuring finds Kent reuniting here with her Babadook lead Essie Davis, who plays ornithologist Nancy Bradley. Along with husband Edgar (Andrew Lincoln), the pair have spent their careers studying Dunlins and their flight patterns. Nancy is fascinated by the bird’s synchronized movements, which allow for elaborate configurations of thousands of birds flying in unison without bumping into each other despite no readily discernable mode of communication. Instead, Nancy refers to the phenomenon as a “murmuring,” even joking that perhaps the birds communicate telepathically. The Bradleys have received funding to decamp to a quiet, isolated island where they will observe and record Dunlins, hopefully furthering their understanding of how these creatures function.

Their trip begins inauspiciously enough; instead of having to camp out in tents in the cold, a local instead offers them an abandoned home to stay in. This caretaker has cleaned it up and made it presentable, and at the very least it will keep them warmer than staying outside. The Bradleys are grateful for the hospitality, and settle into the old but fairly comfortable home. They begin their work early in the mornings, creating recordings of the birds and then reading late into the night. But all is not as it seems. Kent reveals very early on that Nancy and Edgar have lost a child, and while it’s barely remarked upon at first, the seams in the Bradleys’ marriage begin to show themselves soon enough. Edgar tries to initiate intimacy with Nancy while they are alone in the home, casually at first but gradually intensifying and then eventually devolving into anger and frustration once rebuffed. For her part, Nancy seems genuinely happy spending time with her birds but begins hearing strange utterances on her recordings and seeing creeping shadows and dark figures at night. It’s not long before she begins unraveling, unnerved by the house’s dark past and incapable of dealing with her husband and their shared trauma.

The Murmuring is in some ways extremely familiar stuff; the ghostly specters haunting the home and the crimes of the past that Nancy gradually uncovers are well-trod ground.  But here is a case of a fairly trim runtime (65 minutes or so) becoming a virtue. There’s no stringing the audience along waiting for the other shoe to drop, and revelations come quickly and with minimal fuss. It’s also genuinely creepy in places — Kent is nothing if not adept at well-constructed jump scares. But Kent’s real contribution is her sensitivity to character and a minimalist visual sensibility. Eschewing the widescreen format that most of the other segments were shot on, Kent embraces a more narrow aspect ratio, something approximating 1:66. It changes the frame in both obvious and subtle ways, de-emphasizing empty negative space on the sides of the frame and instead creating ample space above the characters heads. The house becomes a cavernous space, the actor’s bodies dwarfed by the imposing architecture and even the skies outside. There’s a fairly obvious bid toward emotional catharsis at film’s end, but more so than solving the mystery of the mad woman and her murdered son who haunt the house, the real achievement is the reconciliation between Nancy and Edgar. No one here is a villain, just damaged people all looking for ways to communicate. It’s a lovely little grace note to end this inaugural season; if Netflix opts to renew Cabinet of Curiosities it for a second season, del Toro world do well to invite Kent back.

Writer: Daniel Gorman