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Cabinet of Curiosities Season 1 Review

Cabinet of Curiosities is a horror anthology series that premiered its first season on Netflix in 2022. It is an uneven, but wonderfully stylish and fun horror show.

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“If a road is not presented, you build one“

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Created by Guillermo del Toro, the show has his stamp all over it, but he only wrote the very first episode. He did, however, appear in the opening introductory sections of each episode where he channeled Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney highly successfully. He introduced each theme and important object within the story deftly.

What then ensued were hour-long episodes that are distinctly different from each other, but each and every one of the eight installments is gorgeously shot, superbly crafted in costumes and production design and strongly acted across the board. What was especially impressive was his hiring of these extremely talented people as directors for every episode. These ranged from well-known figures within the horror genre to the newcomers who’ve already had one or two stupendous indie features under their belt.

The opening episode is titled Lot 36 and it is quite an underrated one. Tim Blake Nelson killed it as this xenophobic, nasty man who is constantly angry amusingly so. The Mexican woman’s role was on-the-nose and ultimately unrealistic, though the morality tale framing worked to a degree. The highlight, though, was the monster that appeared in the final stretches. It was superbly designed and very creepy. It’s a shame that we only saw it in a singular sequence.

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It was nice seeing David Hewlett in the main role in Graveyard Rats. This is a minor work that benefits from striking production design and special effects, but is too simple for its own sake. It is pleasantly old-fashioned in its tone and approach and I adored that. The ending is phenomenal with the final creature being so memorable, but again more could have been done with its theme of greed and its main character.

And now we arrive to The Autopsy, the magnum opus of the first season and one of the finest extraterrestrial stories I’ve witnessed in quite a while. I am a huge SF junkie and even I haven’t seen something this original in an alien story ever before. What starts off as your standard alien parasite story eventually turns into an unpredictable story where the dynamic between the parasite and its host was turned upside down delightfully so. F. Murray Abraham was absolutely fantastic in the main role as is expected of his caliber while the directing from David Prior was top-notch. The creature design and his voice were also great. Watching that final sequence I was blown away by its sheer authenticity and it’s such an amazing installment, in fact, that every other installment seriously paled in comparison.

The Outside is one of the better episodes here. By far the most different story of the bunch, it deals with beauty standards, capitalism and the atrociousness of beauty products forcefully. While lighter than the other episodes, the dark humor as showcased here was great and the main performance from Kate Micucci was outstanding. She was perfectly cast as the outcast protagonist. The ending was wonderfully over-the-top. The episode was directed by the great Ana Lily Amirpour, a breakout hit director of ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’.

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Pickman’s Model is the only episode I did not care for personally. I still did not hate it as no episode here is truly bad or even mediocre. This is a passable one, but I’d expected much more from its admittedly terrific premise. The execution is one full of overly slow sequences and an ending that is too ambiguous. Ben Barnes was great in the main role and the episode looked stylish, but it needed a better script overall.

Dreams in the Witch House brought back Rupert Grint from his slumber and it was wonderful seeing him still have it as his performance is wonderful here. His character’s arc of grief was very well handled while the main monster Keziah was just fabulously designed, devilishly voiced and instantly memorable when horror monsters are concerned. The episode is more fitting for a literary treatment, but its dark fairy tale framing pleasantly reminded me of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, which is why I really liked it.

Panos Cosmatos directed the hell out of The Viewing, the amazing penultimate episode that is another alien storyline, but one that is still original and unexpected in its twists and turns. Its conclusion signaled more to come, which is why it felt disappointingly abrupt, but the build-up was outstanding. I loved the alien mythology here, but the roster of these brilliant scientists and artists having a conversation with this powerful figure about many important themes was the highlight of the story as was the irony of him losing everything in the cruel twist of fate.

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The Murmuring is immensely underrated and a satisfactory finale that isn’t the best episode of this bunch, but it came pretty close. Essie Davis and Andrew Lincoln are both super charming as the ornithologist couple at the center of this ghost story that is also about the grief of a mother losing her baby. The episode featured superbly crafted ghost apparition sequences, but the highlight for me was the emphasis on science and on the aforementioned theme.