‘Sangre Del Toro’ review: Entertaining yet lightweight celebration of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro

Dir: Yves Montmayeur. France/UK. 2025. 85mins

Guillermo del Toro’s passions and preoccupations take centre stage in Sangre Del Toro, a brisk, entertaining documentary about the award-winning Mexican filmmaker. Director Yves Montmayeur avoids utilizing talking-head interviews with del Toro’s contemporaries, instead keeping the focus squarely on his subject in order to craft a collage of ideas and images that define del Toro’s oeuvre.

Leaves us hungry to learn more about the inner workings of the man 

Screening as part of Venice Classics, Sangre Del Toro premieres the day before del Toro’s new film, Frankenstein, plays in competition. (Montmayeur, who previously helmed portraits of directors such as Michael Haneke and Takeshi Kitano, won the Venice Classics prize for Best Documentary On Cinema in 2015 for Guy Maddin profile The 1000 Eyes Of Dr. Maddin.) No doubt del Toro’s fans will seek out this look behind the curtain, even if the documentary makes no claims to be an exhaustive examination of a major filmmaker.

Much of Sangre Del Toro is structured around del Toro’s visit to ’En Casa Con Mis Monstruos’, a 2019 exhibition of materials from his films as well as items in his private collection that were on display at a museum in his hometown of Guadalajara. Touring the collection and sitting down for more traditional interviews, the director discusses the foundational experiences that informed his lifelong fascination with horror and fantasy, which has played out in films such as The Shape Of Water and Hellboy. Crucial to his early creative development was a boyhood fixation on death and disease, which was paired with a fondness for Universal monster movies. He gobbled up horror comics and made short films, designing his own creatures when he wasn’t working odd jobs in places like mental health institutions.

Those hoping for a documentary in which del Toro offers detailed analysis and anecdotes film by film may be disappointed by Montmayeur’s far more intuitive approach. Instead, Montmayeur organises Sangre Del Toro around the themes to which the director keeps returning. Those enamored of del Toro’s pictures will not be surprised to learn that he is drawn to monsters, but Montmayeur catches him in a philosophical mindset as he muses on how Catholicism and Mexican art and culture have also profoundly informed his storytelling.

Montmayeur peppers the 86-minute documentary with clips from his subject’s pictures — Pan’s Labyrinth gets the most attention — but the scenes feel supplemental rather than Sangre Del Toro’s selling point. Tellingly, del Toro’s own work sometimes takes a backseat as the filmmaker heaps praise on others who stir his creativity, including David Cronenberg, manga legend Junji Ito and Honore Fragonard, an 18th-century French anatomist whose macabre presentations of corpses were hauntingly beautiful. Del Toro humbly sees himself as merely part of a lengthy chain of artists who are in dialogue with one another through their work.

His excitement for art, which in the documentary he calls the only proof of magic in the world, belies his reticence to talk about his personal life. Early in Sangre Del Toro, del Toro admits to an unhappy childhood, but we get scant details. Similarly, he points out that his work is fueled by Mexico’s acceptance and embrace of the inevitability of death, but his own relationship with loss is left unexplored. Del Toro speaks eloquently about the monsters who reside in our heads and hearts without ever connecting those insights back to himself. Sangre Del Toro’s subject is smart, jovial company, but he’s rarely introspective or vulnerable.

Fittingly, the documentary concludes with a chapter on his upcoming Frankenstein, with del Toro rhapsodizing about Mary Shelley’s novel and its exploration of what it means to be human. Clearly, he appreciates the book’s affection for outsiders — the same misunderstood characters del Toro has championed since he first picked up a camera. Del Toro’s undying adoration for his fantastical creatures leaves us hungry to learn more about the inner workings of the man who brought them to life.