Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist, brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.
One of the most beloved and iconic cautionary tales in human history, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” challenged science, nature, morality, hubris and the patriarchy, forever reanimating the pulsating nerve-ends of pop culture with countless onscreen interpretive riffs and iterations passed down for two centuries. From the hilariously creepy to the grotesquely comic or the operatically tragic, this story of one such elegy has truly lived up to the term TIMELESS. So a remake was inevitable.
Guillermo Del Toro’s iteration might tread familiar grounds but its emotionally poignancy makes for an engrossing version of the tale.
Forgoing simply adapting Shelley’s story and surgically reconfiguring the mythos, Del Toro’s direction puts his genuine obsession and affinity for drawing monsters into the margins of his own life at the forefront with the meticulous detail of a Victorian anatomist's sketchbook this time. Seizing the familiar narrative and refusing to allow it the dignity of stasis, he lurches forward with hypnotic grace, stitching together a tapestry of delightfully ghoulish intrigue. That being said, that deliberate judgment does coat the psychic rot of the story’s heart in a more black-and-white lens, draining some of the moral ambiguity that made Shelley's original text so hauntingly complex.
Despite its source material being finished as of 1818 and the events of this film shifts the action nearly four decades forward to 1857, it would have been tempting to cherry-pick period trappings from any passing century. Instead, it became almost crucial for the production design to anchor itself in the Victorian era grounds for its clotted, high-necked, gaslit mania zeitgeist and the end results are an ornate, burnished thing of beauty. Appropriately vast with painstaking detail, Tamara Deverell’s crackerjack hybrid of gothic romanticism and neurological illustrations is living tissue grafted and stitched together with such surgical precision and paintery composition, it drives a hard stake into the viscera of the moment; creating both a labyrinth and a Petri dish out of the juxtaposition of tactile, almost suffocatingly beautiful decor and the atmospheric, fantastical grandiosity Del Toro specializes in. Yet the only downside to all that is it doesn’t completely master the visual grammar or the spacial awareness to look and feel imposing, like in Crimson Peak.
Off the bat, the presentation is hampered due to Netflix’s signature instance on flat realism: lack of contrast and dim lighting among other things. Now on its own, the tangibility of said presentation still helps form a dialectic that is at once cerebral and sensate but the grand scope and scale it wants to reach feels faint. For as often as it may occasionally draw attention to itself, Dan Lausten’s swoony, intimate camerawork, deliberate framing and resplendent color saturation does help illuminate the opulence of the world while grounding it in the practicality of the era.
Evan Schiff’s editing was just the icing on the gothic operatic cake.
Pacing has a rhythm that ebbs and flows, wavers in and out depending on the sequence but its magnetic pull and momentum means it never needlessly meanders on to where I felt disengaged, the tone is the prototypical gothic operatic melancholy with few bits of levity sprinkled in, there’s a deep appreciation for the world-building, the patient layering of visual motifs and historical trivia, costume design is a mortuary triumph in visual synchronicity and color psychology despite not being 100% accurate to the time period and I am here for all the chewiness of its practical effects; so much so that when the more dodgy CGI rears on through, it doesn’t distract me as much.
Alexandre Desplat’s work remains as muscular as ever, his symmetric, precise form and ethereal cadences creates this delicate, haunting bridge, reminiscent of The Shape of Water, amplifying the tragic poetry of the creature's loneliness, the sound design’s aural architecture balances atmospheric dread with visceral immediacy, it well and truly earns its R-rating for grisly imagery and lets be real: the 150 minute runtime is a blessing and curse in equal measure. I already mentioned how the pacing goes in and out but the lack of tension and feverish intensity, along with the sheer girth of all that time that makes this protracted immersion peculiar. While not oppressive, its the type of bloat that swells and contradicts with a will of its own even if you crave a slow-burn descent.
It’s almost not worth going over the ensemble, for the wondrous, if not animated acting speaks for itself. For as overly blunt/half-eloquent the dialogue is presented—singing with a kind of lyrical quality that also teeters on prose and self-camp—the character work ensures every performer serves a nervous knot in this tapestry and the script gives them just enough room to completely disappear into their roles.
Jacob Elordi’s quiet magnetism and physicality as The Creature imbues him with an unnerving humanity that's both pitiable and terrifying while helping elide the more unsavory aspects of the Creature from the book to make him feel more soulful (whether that’s beneficial or not depends on who watches this). And that pathos makes a stark contrast to Oscar Issac’s manic, snooty, even more dickish iteration of Victor Frankenstein. Christoph Waltz turns in perhaps his most sympathetic performance since Alita: Battle Angel and great mother of Pearl, the terrifying Mia Goth continues to unsettle me not with unblinking ferocity this time but a more quiet, introspective manner despite not having much to do.
What was once a life-damning tragedy in the book where the Creature becomes as horrible as its father if not worse, turns into a rather morose, meditative ballet on loneliness, ego, violence and redemption here, effectively daisy-chaining multiple subgenres together to where the stitched seams itself want to feel like a motif. Del Toro’s gamble to disrupt the narrative flow doesn’t treat itself as a gimmick but as a way to grant each emotional catastrophe or fleeting tenderness its own time to metastasize; something the narrative framing device of all three acts was always going to be mildly disruptive to, flirting with a congenial static and somewhat simplified emotional palette on top of the fleeting artistic indulgence to flowery philosophizing and 16th-century pageantry. Yet providing that contemplative skeleton with the necessary breathing room to marinate in every decision made means that, for all the liberties and improvisations it makes to the original story, it still captures enough of the beating heart beneath Shelley's cautionary tale with reverent, blood-stained hands.
It’s almost uncanny how much this mirrors and indirectly communicates with his Pinocchio film, both of which follow fathers making unnatural children due to the trauma of losing a loved one and the non-human protagonist trying to navigate societies curated specifically to spite them.
Both equal parts a cautionary tale of the consequences to those who hastily try to play God, a hit piece on the worst characteristics of the male gender, ambition without conscience, society creating its own monsters, what happens when science forgets the soul and the loneliness of being unwanted — all of which speaks to the tragedy about the nature of the soul, supercharging this film’s beating heart with an emotional resonance that the novel intentionally avoids without having to pull its punches. Thematic motifs—alienation, longing, god-complexes—are stitched together with all the care of fine embroidery, even if the dramatic engine occasionally stalls and for a film that wants you to contemplate its grandeur more than be throttled by it, Its own refusal to apologize for essentially being a remix and wearing its hand-me-downs with pride is its most defiantly transgressive act; a daring move in an age where fealty to the source material is an optional currency.
Unfortunately, there’s no getting away from how blatantly it telegraphs its own themes and while the ending feels thematically relevant to what was built up beforehand—throwing in some Catholic metaphorical layering to where Victoria and the Creature’s endings befit that epigraph Shelley provided in the first edition of her novel—the rushed nature of it does negate the impact.
This is one of those remakes that solidifies, to me, that certain stories demand to be retold not out of necessity, not because Hollywood is bankrupt but because its timelessness needs to be tested and planted for every new generation to dissect for themselves. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein never was going to accurately adhere to the faded script of Shelley’s original, nor unearth some heretofore undiscovered seam of meaning we didn’t already know but that right there, I believe, is the point; acknowledging its own excesses and irrelevance with this grim tenderness that keeps the spirit of the story rich.
