"Frankenstein" review — Del Toro reanimates classic monster tale with dark beauty
“Victor!”
Far to the north, at the distant white edge of the world, a Danish sea captain and his weary crew find themselves slinging pickaxes against the thickening ice that has steadily crept its way up the hull. Freezing and running out of food, they are greeted one night by fire far out on the distant planes of infinite ice with the body of a broken and bleeding man beside it. A stranger in these parts. A trapper, perhaps. His rifle would suggest he was hunting some sort of game. But he is not alone. A roar of a beast echoes across the great reach as they pull the dying man aboard the vessel. The monstrous creature lumbers nearer, wrapped in distressed fabrics. It’s taller than any man, tears through the crew with ease, and will not fall to rifle shot nor bayonet. What manner of being is this? A man? An animal? A demon? The dying man knows far too well what he has found there in the Arctic. It’s a baleful shadow — and his great creation.
As Oscar Isaac’s violent and sadistic interpretation of Victor Frankenstein tears through the muscles and sinews of decaying corpses for the sake of his frightening experiments, so Guillermo del Toro constructs a bloody and electrified retelling of Mary Shelley’s tale of hubris. Del Toro uses his distinct and grandiose sense of visual style to great effect here, as Frankenstein serves a delightful array of massive sets, stylistically created digital effects, powerful religious symbolism, and bone-cracking gore, complementing a film that has far more going on under the hood than this description might lead you to believe. The brilliant pairing of Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, each serving as narrator for one of the film’s two halves, gives the film a set of weighty performances to build its over-the-top stylings on. It’s far from a faithful adaptation of the original text (has there ever been?), but the film preserves Shelley’s empathy for her monsters and the deep ruminations on the nature of humanity that she delves into. It’s moody, creepy, gothic, and macabre, making the film a wonderful update of the Frankenstein myth and another highlight in the world of del Toro.
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| Photo via Netflix. |
Oscar Isaac plays the leading role of Victor Frankenstein, a doctor on the fringes of the medical world who is in a desperate search for the ability to conquer death itself, after the tragic death of his mother when she gave birth to his younger brother, William. As Victor confesses to the audience through his narration of the first half, he has gained notoriety in the “limited” world of academia, as he refers to it dismissively, for his rather upsetting experiments in reanimating dead flesh by overloading the nervous system with electricity. Victor takes after his father in his profession. Baron Leopold Frankenstein (played in the film’s prologue by Charles Dance, making this the second time he has played Victor Frankenstein’s father on film), an emotionally detached and physically abusive man, was one of the greatest physicians of his day. It’s a case of obsession and familial burdens that push Victor towards his goals. Isaac’s Frankenstein is far from the maniacal madman of Colin Clive’s 1931 interpretation, but is distinctly more frightening and ill-intentioned than Shelley’s tragic hero. Isaac’s performance is fantastic here, ranging from brooding and mysterious to frantic and crazed, with so much space given to him to find the murky waters between his volatile states of being.
Into Frankenstein’s rejection from the university steps Henrich Harlander (a character added to this version of the story, played by Christoph Waltz), an arms dealer who’s made a fortune selling munitions during the Crimean War. Harlander also just so happens to be the uncle of William Frankenstin’s fiancée, Elizabeth, a woman with whom Victor becomes infatuated. One Faustian bargain later, and Frankenstein has been given a laboratory (in the form of a lonely cliffside tower, limitless resources, and a large network of support to build his fantastical machines. He maps out the nervous and lymphatic systems carefully, records all of his progress, and readies himself for his great sacrilege. His brother, William (played by Felix Kammerer), a financier, takes some hesitancy to the whole ordeal, but perhaps this is just another one of Victor’s obsessive fantasies. For what man could ever hope to take on the role of God? Yet Victor persists despite the complexity of his work. He pulls together scraps of corpses from executed prisoners and soldiers who died in the war, and begins to put together his unhallowed masterwork. And in that dark and stormy night, as rain sweeps the lichen-covered stones of the tower, the Creature is born.
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| Photo via Netflix. |
This version of Frankenstein makes some strong changes from the original text as del Toro brings the film into darker sensibilities and more “modern” understandings of science (although, in fairness, there are two competing versions of the original text itself — a 1818 version and a 1831 version — meaning that Shelley herself would certainly make changes to the story). The bones of Mary Shelley’s original novel, with the full title Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus, a myth which is alluded to directly by Harlander, are still reliably here. This is a tale of tragic hubris and a miscalculated end, even if the details are reworked. The film pushes the story forward in time by several decades, from its original vague 18th-century setting to the mid-1850s, beyond when the novel itself was first published. Here, Victor’s father is a controlling and abusive doctor, Elizabeth (played by Mia Goth) is his brother’s fiancée, Harlander is added into the mix, Robert Walton is replaced with a Danish sea captain, and many of the novel’s plot beats, particularly in the second half, are absent. Many of these changes, however, serve a very clear narrative purpose: this is the Creature’s story.
Frankenstein’s name might be written in ink as the film’s title, but it’s Jacob Elordi’s Creature who makes the strongest impression. While many of the film’s changes from the book make the story darker and more menacing, its changes to the Creature’s story make the monster all the more sympathetic. Elordi brings naivety and curiosity to the Creature, elevating a tragic story to one about perseverance and ascension. The Creature’s devastating and heartbreaking journey of self-discovery defines the arc of the film’s second half, imitating the way the novel is constructed. The film pivots away from the horrific and gruesome work of Doctor Frankenstein and explores the pain at the centre of the Creature’s being. The literary education he receives thanks to a kindly blind old man (played by David Bradley) becomes one of the film’s most gentle and touching sections, elevating what can be a rather slow passage in the original text. Here, the Creature’s explorations of everything the basic elements of the world to the words of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and, in a beautifully meta way, Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” This is a creature moulded by learning as much as violence, who must reconcile between his violent birth and the great potential he has. But soon the winds of fate shift, and the Creature finds himself on the run again, headed straight for the Frankenstein family home to confront his creator.
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| Photo via Netflix. |
While writer-director Guillermo del Toro might be adapting Shelley’s novel, he is also very gleefully pulling influence from the likes of James Whale’s previously mentioned 1931 adaptation and Francis Ford Coppola’s visually delightful 1992 Dracula adaptation. This is a project that del Toro has been angling to make for years, and his passion for the materiel is evident throughout. The Mexican filmmaker — known for his sci-fi romance The Shape of Water, his Spanish-language horror hit Pan’s Labyrinth, and his incredible stop-motion Pinocchio film — brings his usual flair for the visually dramatic to the extravagant sets, rich textural details, and gnarly make-up that make Frankenstein so fascinating to behold. Having had the delight of seeing the film projected on warbly and tactile 35mm, del Toro’s visual machinations, including the strange visual effects, are rendered in rotting extravagance. The gore and horror elements of the text are employed to great effect and elevated, thanks to some revolting set dressing and sound effects, making Frankenstein’s work of corpses a visually and auditorily revolting experience. Through the expressive visual language, there’s a strong throughline of Christian, and particularly Catholic, symbolism present here — no doubt shaped by del Toro’s Catholic upbringing — that embeds a divine sense of purpose and scale in the film. While comparing the Creature to the Biblical Adam is not an invention of del Toro, some adaptations of the novel have even given him the name “Adam,” this film does present a Christological comparison, which is even more fascinating.
There is great depth to be found in this version of the classic monster myth, to the surprise of no one with a passing familiarity with either del Toro or the original text. Del Toro rather deftly cuts into the story’s central questions of human nature, identity, and personhood. He has made a career out of humanizing and empathizing with so-called “monsters,” which makes Frankenstein an obvious continuation of the thematic content that unites so much of his filmography. Where better to go than to the grandmother of all monster stories? While del Toro claims that his Frankenstein is not a horror movie — which I very strongly disagree with, as I found myself startled and disturbed many times during my screening — I understand where this thought comes from. This film doesn’t operate with scares on the mind. Instead, it invites the viewer into some rather difficult emotional subject material, from complicated paternal relationships to man’s relationship with the divine. For all of its gothic architecture and inhumane cadaver treatment, there’s a very strong heart beating within. Sure, the themes of the film are painfully obvious and unmistakable, but the relationship between Frankenstein and his monster makes them feel so well-realized. While Frankenstein ponders where the soul comes from in the body, this film has certainly found the soul in the Creature yet again.
Frankenstein is now playing in selected theatres and will begin streaming on Netflix on November 7.
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