Guillermo del Toro’s lush, faithful spin on Shelley’s tale is equal parts creature feature and soul search
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
It is no exaggeration to say that Guillermo del Toro has been waiting his entire life to make “Frankenstein,” and the jaw-dropping result might be described as a visually lavish, darkly Gothic, very personal take on Shelley’s hugely influential tale. An avid fan of James Whale’s “Frankenstein” (1931), which was based on a truncated 1927 stage adaptation by Peggy Webling, and Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), as a child, del Toro has chosen to make a version more faithful to the landmark 1818 Gothic novel by Mary Shelley, although del Toro, who also scripted this adaptation, changes many of the details. Del Toro also incorporates visual flourishes from artist Bernie Wrightson’s famous 1983 illustrated edition of “Frankenstein” published by Marvel Comics.
In del Toro’s version, the action begins with a flash forward in which a sickly Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is a passenger aboard a ship stuck Shackleton-like in the ice of a frozen sea. The ship’s captain (a powerful Lars Mikkelsen) protects him. The imagery conjures Dracula’s voyage aboard the Demeter. Frankenstein’s Creature (Australian actor Jacob Elordi, “Saltburn”), who is notably more handsome than Wrightson’s cadaver-faced creation, has a violent encounter with armed sailors on the ice, kills several of them and displays the ability to recover from injuries like a 19th-century Wolverine.
The story then unfolds in flashbacks narrated first by Victor and then by the Creature. We go back to Geneva, where young Victor is a brilliant, perhaps mad lecturer, who grotesquely revives a partial corpse. In a subplot, Victor is given a castle with a tower and funds to experiment to his heart’s desire by an arms dealer (Christoph Waltz). This might be seen as the sort of deal with the devil that an artist like del Toro makes. Victor’s beloved younger brother William (Felix Kammerer, “All Quiet on the Western Front”) is engaged to the beautiful Elizabeth (a wildly garbed Mia Goth in a dual role), to whom “mad scientist” Victor is strongly attracted. Victor and William’s dictatorial father is played by Charles Dance in Victor’s boyhood. Victor’s pregnant mother (also Goth), to whom he is devoted, dies in childbirth. Her funeral recalls Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992). “No one can conquer Death,” someone says. Victor, del Toro’s alter ego, dreams of a “dark angel.”
For del Toro, all of his films—from “Cronos” (1992) to this latest release—are Frankensteins, the twisted creations that spring up from his subconscious and first take the form of drawings. In some sense, all films are “Frankensteins,” cobbled-up creations that never quite live up to their creators’ dreams. We see many shots of Victor’s “medical” illustrations and designs. The drawings are a recurring motif in del Toro’s work, too (and are his own). When Victor creates life out of dead things, he is not just a “mad scientist” who is “playing God.” He is doing what every artist before him has done, making new work out of “existing parts.” In “Frankenstein,” the “artist/father” rejects his creation and tries to destroy it, the equivalent of a father trying to murder his son (see Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”). But like in the novel, the Creature survives and finds a hiding place beside a family of sheep herders, whose blind grandfather (del Toro regular David Bradley) teaches the “stranger” to read and write and befriends him. This is the first time that the Creature feels love and happiness. He longs for “a (female) companion.” Or in one of the film’s several “Death and the Maiden” match-ups, he might just take Victor’s Elizabeth, who visits the Creature in his chains (see Milton’s “Samson Agonistes”). Unlike Boris Karloff’s child-like, non-vocal Monster of Whale’s “Frankenstein,” who suggests a silent film character in an early talking picture, Elordi’s undeniably hunkier “Creature” becomes increasingly aware and enlightened and perhaps even the intellectual equal of his maker. Elordi bestows a macabre grandeur and dignity upon the misbegotten, monstrous outcast, who may be more god than man.
Meanwhile, Victor has a wealth of raw material to work with. His laboratory is a virtual meat market of the recently hanged and bloodied and battered dead from a nearby battlefield. Paging Hammer Films’ Peter Cushing. The laboratory’s most prominent image is a bas relief of snake-haired Medusa, mouth agape. Our mouths also gape, beholding the stunning work of del Toro regulars, cinematographer Dan Laustsen, who plunges us into chiaroscuro visions, production designer Tamara Deverell and costume designer Kate Hawley. The lush score is by two-time Academy Award-winner Alexandre Desplat. Although we wish we had more of Goth’s Elizabeth, she is a perfect dark fairy tale princess.
While del Toro is more faithful to Shelley, he cannot resist a few Kenneth Strickfaden-like flourishes during the “creation” sequence, such as antennae to harvest the lightning. What is this harvested lightning except cinema itself, the shaft of divine light that awakens the artist inside us? In “Frankenstein,” del Toro reveals his innermost self, the child whose Gothic brain sprang to life after he first saw Whale’s “Frankenstein” and who now gives us a “Frankenstein” remarkably his own.
‘Frankenstein’
Rating: R for bloody violence and grisly images
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, David Bradley
Director/Writer: Guillermo del Toro
Running time: 149 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters
Grade: A
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