In “Cabinet of Curiosities,” Guillermo Del Toro makes a credible and magnanimous master of ceremonies, if less imperious than the series’s conceptual forebearer, Alfred Hitchcock.
of “Pinocchio,” comes off as a benevolent Geppetto, showing his collaborators off to the world.
One of the only millennial-adjacent voices in the bunch is the Iranian American provocateur Ana Lily Amirpour, who is best known for her Iran-set vampire tale “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” Her episode in the anthology, “The Outside,” is a grotesque self-improvement parable starring the perpetually dilated Kate Micucci as an insecure woman attempting to physically reinvent herself.
To its credit, “Outside” has nervous energy. “The Murmuring,” directed by Kent from a story by del Toro himself, is comparatively sophisticated, but restrained and intellectualized to a fault. Working in a measured, soporific mode that recalls the slow-burn of “The Babadook” minus the iconographic qualities of its ghostly antagonist, Kent’s episode delves into the biggest bugaboo of contemporary horror-movie discourse: the putatively universal and thoroughly exhausted notion of “trauma.
Del Toro’s other story contribution in the anthology, “Lot 36”— directed by his countryman and former cinematographer Guillermo Navarro—is more successful. It’s an old-school cautionary tale whose ethically reckless protagonist, an embittered Iraq war vet played by Tim Blake Nelson, gets what’s coming to him and then some.