Sangre del Toro

The Minotaur’s Mirror: How Sangre del Toro Lets Guillermo del Toro Curate His Own Myth

There’s a moment in Sangre del Toro where Guillermo del Toro stands in the middle of his Guadalajara exhibition, En Casa con Mis Monstruos, and gestures toward a glass case holding a grotesque, half-melted figure. “This,” he says, “is what fear looks like when it’s been loved.” The camera lingers on his face—equal parts showman and scholar—as he traces the contours of the creature with his fingers, as if blessing it. It’s a small, quiet beat, but it encapsulates the entire film: a man introducing us to his monsters not as horrors to be feared, but as companions to be understood. The question is whether we’re being invited into a labyrinth or a carefully constructed shrine.

Yves Montmayeur’s documentary, which premiered at Venice in 2025 before landing on Netflix, is billed as an “Ariadne’s thread” through del Toro’s “enchanted labyrinth.” The metaphor isn’t subtle, but it’s apt. Like the myth, the film promises a guide—del Toro himself—who will lead us through the twists and turns of his creative psyche. What it delivers, however, is something more slippery: a self-portrait painted in broad, affectionate strokes, where the Minotaur at the center is both the artist and the myth he’s spent a lifetime constructing.

As Screen Daily put it, it’s an “entertaining yet lightweight celebration” of the filmmaker, one that “rarely connects those insights back to himself” in any meaningful way. Tim Grierson, writing for Screen International, was even more pointed: “Del Toro speaks eloquently about the monsters who reside in our heads and hearts without ever connecting those insights back to himself.” The film, then, isn’t so much a deep dive as a surface-level wade through waters del Toro has already charted.

That’s not to say Sangre del Toro lacks for charm or insight. Montmayeur, a documentarian with a knack for filmmaker profiles (his work on The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Maddin is a cult favorite), clearly has a longstanding rapport with del Toro.

The access here is intimate, almost familial. We see del Toro in his element—lecturing to students, wandering through his exhibition, holding court in his Bleak House library—his enthusiasm for the macabre as infectious as ever. There’s a warmth to these scenes, a sense of being let in on a secret.