Change Your Image
rragnarokr
Reviews
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities: Graveyard Rats (2022)
Lovely, like a literature study where everything has a purpose
This episode like the others was full with metaphors, symbols and so on. Felt like peeling off layers upon layers of symbols.
I loved the originality and thought put into it.
Themes encountered:
1. Lies: His exaggerated lies turned out to be true: ironic and a punishment for his bad behaviour
2. Greed: in order to underline his greed, a parallel was made to prove that point with the mummy, who was also obsessed with the necklace as Masson was with his money and stolen belongings, almost fighting with the coroner for the dead man's teeth. So the mummy is a parallel to Masson himself
3. Lack of empathy: as the widow cried at her husband's funeral, Masson rejoiced and smiled and felt so happy (because he was about to rob the deceased), showing us he had no redeeming qualities not even pitty or empahy for the widow if not for the deceased.
4. Foreshadowing: His nightmare while laying in bed, that the ceiling would fall and he would be covered in rats (and die) was a foreshadowing of what was to come: die buried alive with rats all over him killing him.
5. Hypocrite: He has crosses and religious objects on his walls, yet he would discard the human soul and have no remorse for treating the deceased as once people but as objects. What does that tell you? Just like the lies he told the man who was rushing him to pay the dept, Masson was also lying to himself about being an actual Christian.
6. Irredeemable: He prayed to God to help him, then he indeed did get the help he prayed for so desperately for him to blow it all away : not wanting to let go of his greed, aka give the necklace back to the crawling mummy behind him. He was given a chance and he blew it and thus he soon died.
7. Green, again: There were so many valuable things in the pile of bones, but Masson had to be greedy and not stop at anything, not even stop from taking the tentacle necklace from the creepy mummy. He knew he was in a horrible devilish place, yet his greed was stronger than anything else.
So we seem Masson being greedy in the beginning, ok, but after going through all that fright and ordeal, he didn't grow, change or learn anything from it, but kept being as greedy as he was in the very beginning. So Masson proved to be always greedy no matter what, which lead to his demise.
The themes encountered are: compulsive lying and extreme greed.
Laboratory Conditions (2017)
Intriguing and original
Left me wanting more, I wanted to see further into the story and what happens. It peeked my interest, it felt real, the actors played excellent and the idea itself was new and original as well as the way it was displayed.
I saw people who were kind, who were selfish and who were in between as well as the idea of supernatural and death. These elements combined, where the selfish person forced the hand of the gifted one peeked my interest in wanting to see the continuation of the entire situation as well as the backtories.
But somehow in this short video, a lot of questions were answered about what drives and motivates each person. I was able to root and feel like I knew these people while watching the entire video for such a short period of time. The ability of the actors to say and express so much even without saying is to be admired.