Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities travels back in time for ‘Pickman’s Model,’ adapting a classic H.P. Lovecraft short story into a chilling tale about art destroying the artist.
H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model’ was first published in Weird Tales in 1927, while it was previously adapted for TV in a 1971 episode of Night Gallery. Here Netflix gives it the big-budget treatment as part of their Cabinet of Curiosities horror anthology.
Keith Thomas (The Vigil, 2022’s Firestarter) directs from a script by Lee Patterson (Curve, The Colony) but as ever, producer Guillermo Del Toro appears onscreen in a pre-credit scene, to set the story up.
“I paint what I see is a painter’s maxim,” says Del Toro, ‘One that reveals to us the many layers of our world. Because behind everything beautiful lies the dark. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what about the horror? We ascribe these visions to a feverish imagination. A whim. A folly. But what if they are not? What if they are a careful record, a warning, or a family album?”
What is Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities ‘Pickman’s Model’ about?
Kicking off in 1909, Ben Barnes plays William Thurber, an aspiring portrait artist attending the Maskatonic University in Massachusetts. And he’s doing rather well, having won a contest to have his work displayed in the local Arkham Gallery.
Then a man called Richard Upton Pickman (Crispin Glover) arrives at the school, disrupting class with dark drawings set tongues wagging. He had a tough start in life, as Pickman’s mother apparently died from suicide when he was young, which in turn sent his mother mad.
He himself is certainly eccentric, and prone to high drama, spending his nights sketching dead cats in the local graveyard, and claiming that he finds elusive truths “where fear lives”. Thurber feels drawn to his work however, especially a painting Pickman shows him during a visit to his gothic abode.
Seems Pickman’s family hails from New England, and an ancestor was burned during the witch trials. But not before she’d fed her husband to a coven that were over for dinner. Pickman has drawn this scene, and the imagery shocks and appals Thurber, and triggers visions that terrify the young artist to his core.
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The demon artist and the demon drink
Mid-way through proceedings, the film jumps forward in time, to 1926, where Thurber has settled down in a big, creaking house – with wife and child – and put the horrors of those pictures behind him. Then Pickman walks back into his life, with more drawings, more grand claims (“The world is mad, that’s what breeds fear!”), and plans to stage an exhibition of his work.
And so, Thurber’s waking nightmares return, a standout involving his head being separated from his body while tied to a bed. But what makes this aspect of the story interesting is the fact that Thurber has his own demons in the shape of a drink problem.
“The darkness has a way of catching me,” he states late in proceedings, causing him – and as a by-product us – to question if said visions are due to him being “drunk, delirious, shell-shocked, or broken.”
Which causes those around Thurber to doubt him, and Thurber to doubt himself, the truth only becoming clear when Pickman makes him an offer he can’t refuse. By then, however, it’s tragically too late.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities ‘Pickman’s Model’ score: 6/10
There are some unintentional laughs in ‘Pickman’s Model’ thanks to Crispin Glover’s accent, and a creature that looks less like a monster and more like a ball-bag. There are times when it really feels like a short story padded out to an hour. And It’s also a somewhat solemn affair that lacks the thrills and scares of the cabinet’s more memorable curiosities. But it looks great – most notably when Pickman’s paintings come to life – while a sting in the tail’s tale is the stuff of true nightmares, the film ending in suitably nasty fashion.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is streaming on Netflix.
