Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro
Persecution, vengeance, the milk of human kindness made all the more nourishing by its rarity – it’s all here in Guillermo del Toro’s retelling of Frankenstein, along with barbaric violence, tender feelings, and the redemptive power of forgiveness.
Del Toro is in his gothic element, and it shows right down to the macabre details. Its quality handiwork and loving restoration by a genre enthusiast, which won’t ever go amiss, and neither will something as thematically evergreen as self-acceptance – even self-love – in face of a world fearful of what it considers unnatural. Even if Del Toro’s version departs from Mary Shelley’s source material, the heart and soul is there.
It starts at the end of the world, as a Danish merchant ship comes across a man lying broken in the freezing cold of the North Pole. A nearby roar sends the sailors reeling back to the boat, frozen man in tow, but the creature who emerges from the icy fog proves near impossible to deter, let alone kill. Once their rescue comes to, he begs to surrender him to the beast, because it won’t ever stop chasing him, and frankly, he deserves this fate. The merchant ship captain, a dogged but civilized man, listens to his story.
What unfolds is a tale of foolhardy ambition, unrequited love, madness, obsession, cruelty, and grace, where Oscar Isaac stars as Victor Frankenstein, self-obsessed scientific maverick, Christoph Waltz as his dandy benefactor Harlander, and Mia Goth as Elizabeth, Victor’s sister-in-law to be and a kind soul who can see past the flesh to the person underneath. Also in the mix: Felix Kammerer as Victor’s brother William, too normal amongst these jokers, and therefore forgettable, alas.
Goth has made a name for herself playing intensely asocial characters, her perfectly round eyes spyholes from behind which something venomous seems poised to strike. Yet she’s actually warm to the touch as Elizabeth, the only soft place for a head to rest in a movie faithful to the Gothic inspiration: awful weather, abject poverty, plague, pain, suffering for sustenance is the world in which all its characters move. Del Toro makes the misery plain, even if the main characters are insulated from the worst in shape of their wealth, but he also softens Frankenstein using the creature itself.
Jacob Elordi lends his sizable frame and sensitive eyes to the creature, and Elordi’s version wears his heart on his sleeve of patched-together skin, forgoing the more stoic rendition you might recall. The creature’s feelings are acute, and so is Elordi’s work, his emotions shining out from behind those big eyes, and his mostly-naked frame cuddling every warm feeling and flexing in frustration at the many frustrations he must endure.
Frankenstein is for the fans: of the gothic horror genre, of del Toro, and of Shelley’s source novel. It’s no radical reinvention in any sense, but a faithful blend of all three that doesn’t diminish their sources. It’s truly an A-movie production, with fine performances and absolute mastery below the line, the outcome of an army of talented artisans and craftspeople applying themselves, and the result is a niche type of movie that anyone can easily enjoy.
Mikkel Frederiksen 