Guillermo del Toro has earned his place as the keeper of the monster movie genre. Through a 40-year career that has taken him from Mexico to Spain to the US, del Toro has consistently crafted three-dimensional monsters, whether they’re frightening children or taking unexpected turns as romantic leads.
His first Hollywood movie, released in 1997, was a troubled production. Mimic follows an entomologist (Mira Sorvino) who creates a special breed of insects to counteract a deadly pandemic. The creature ends up mutating into a horrifying human-sized predator called the Long John. It’s streaming for free on Tubi, making this the perfect chance to watch some of the most disturbing bugs ever captured on camera as they threaten to overtake New York City.
Del Toro has publicly described the making of Mimic as one of the worst experiences of his life and the reason why he almost quit working in Hollywood. “It was a horrible, horrible, horrible experience,” he told The Independent in 2018. “I was interfered with in plot, in casting, in the type of action. They second-guessed all the time. I never had a single day that was pleasant.” The film was produced by Dimension Films, the horror and sci-fi subdivision of Miramax Films, with del Toro clashing repeatedly with Harvey Weinstein over its direction.
Mimic begins by introducing Sickler’s Disease, an illness that has killed hundreds of children and spreads through cockroaches, one of the world’s most adaptable and widespread insects. Dr. Susan Tyler (Sorvino) is called in to help design a cure, engineering a special type of bug she calls the Judas breed, capable of taking out the roaches and containing the spread of the pandemic. To prevent the Judas breed from propagating and creating a different host of problems, Tyler makes the bugs sterile. The plan works: she eradicates the disease, saving the lives of thousands of children. In the process, she also meets the love of her life, Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam). Of course, that’s not the end of the story.
A few years later, a police officer (Josh Brolin) begins investigating strange incidents taking place in New York’s subway system, leading Tyler and Mann to discover that the Judas bug has survived and evolved through multiple generations. During its time in the city’s sewers, the bug has propagated, creating a colony of its own. The creatures are now abnormally large and adaptable, and have learned how to mimic humans.
The monster del Toro creates is something to behold. Brought to life by Doug Jones, who would later become one of del Toro’s key collaborators, the Long John is human-sized and looks like… well, a giant cockroach, with extra legs and translucent wings. To blend into the human world, the bug wears a long black coat and camouflages itself in its surroundings. The creature is most effective when captured in the shadows, with del Toro allowing your imagination to do the heavy lifting. He pays close attention to the sounds it makes, how it communicates with the other bugs, and the way its body shapeshifts. In one of the film’s most frightening moments, a close-up shows the bug rearranging its face, going from insect to humanoid, with del Toro painfully capturing all of the squelching. He’s a filmmaker who revels in the props he’s working with, delivering a scene that’s reminiscent of the Xenomorph in Alien. These moments are so effective that the film’s one pivot to CGI – thankfully brief – drops all of the tension and the scares, simply looking dated.
Del Toro and Weinstein’s power struggle is clear as you watch the film. Throughout its runtime, the movie struggles with its tone, gravitating between a thought-provoking story of doctors dealing with the consequences of their actions, and late ‘90s action slop that spends half of its runtime trapped in the city’s sewers. By its end, Mimic exterminates the frightening questions it built towards with a limp conclusion that feels tacked on by the studio. It delivers a Hollywood happy ending that has no emotional payoff and feels like it belongs to a separate film.
For all of Mimic’s behind-the-scenes drama, its failings can be summed up in its lead creature. When compared to the rest of del Toro’s roster of monsters, the Long John stands out as the only example of a one-dimensional creature. Sure, it’s repellent and the stuff of nightmares, but narratively, it’s a far cry from the complex treatment that del Toro lends to his ambivalent Faun from Pan’s Labyrinth or, most recently, his take on Frankenstein’s misunderstood monster. Still, even pared down and held back by studio forces, Mimic remains a showcase of del Toro’s talents as a filmmaker and his eye for memorable imagery. Whether you like the movie or not, you’ll have a hard time forgetting the Long John.
Mimic is free to stream on Tubi.