Asher Luberto
It’s aaalive, but not in the ways you might think. Sewing together a career’s worth of limbs, intestines and dismembered body parts from his previous films, taking fleshy bits from former pictures and transfusing it into Mary Shelley’s source material, director Guillermo del Toro has electrified his dream project and made the monstrous creation entirely his own. 1931’s Frankenstein was the movie that inspired del Toro to become a moviemaker, and he’s been tinkering with his vision for the beastly project ever since he made his first film back in 1992. In an interview decades ago, he said he dreamed of making the greatest Frankenstein ever, but dreams can be delusions of the heart. Not for del Toro. A director who’s realized some of the most wonderful dreamscapes to ever grace the screen, del Toro has given us one of the greatest screen adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel, even if his style goes a bit overboard in the final stretch.
In the 200 years since Mary Shelley first realized her “hideous progeny,” which she came up with after reading Milton’s philosophical Paradise Lost, there have been countless screen adaptations, hundreds of plays and millions of Halloween costumes based on the creature, but most of them have fallen short of their predecessor (the less said about Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation the better). Most directors have realized Shelley’s creation as a monster with a screw loose, a pathetic imbecile that resembles Simple Jack with a gym membership (you ma, ma, maaa, make me human). What separates del Toro’s creation from the pack is his admiration for the creature.
The human heart behind the mangled guise is what makes del Toro special — his personal and profound understanding of the fish in The Shape of Water or the creepy crawlies in Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s what makes Frankenstein a natural pairing for del Toro. Frankenstein opens in the same climate as Shelley’s novel, as sailors pry their frozen ship out of the frigid grip of Arctic winter. A bearded man with bloody rags comes screaming out of the icy mist. The monster is not far behind.
Jacob Elordi as The Creature (Courtesy of Netflix)
Like in the novel, Frankenstein tells the story of maker and creature from their differing perspectives. In the first half, we meet the maddening mad scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), who likes to show off his intellect with annoying egotistical monologues. Isaac plays his Frankenstein with insufferable vigor, which he does majestically. As a young man, Frankenstein gets kicked out of medical school for trying to reanimate a half-corpse pieced together from various human parts, but fortunately, a rich merchant (Christoph Waltz) offers to set him up in a grand Gothic castle to materialize his vision. Of course, he succeeds in bringing his creation (Jacob Elordi) to life, but instead of a normal human being, his specimen is a sinewy hulk with the brain of a toddler who doesn’t know the difference between a leaf and the stream that carries it.
Del Toro is certainly in tune with Shelley’s modernist critique of artificial intelligence — the novel was written during the Industrial Revolution and has been slyly updated to critique contemporary AI — but he’s far more interested in the intelligence behind his creature’s scarred tissue. The second half, told from the creature’s perspective, is where del Toro’s film really soars. After escaping murder from the hands of his creator, he makes his way to a farm in the countryside, where he befriends a blind man in the most heartwarming scene in the film. I’ll never forget when I first saw Boris Karloff befriend that old man in 1931’s Frankenstein — it was as if I was watching a child become a man before my very eyes. Del Toro brings almost impossible emotion to the monster’s self-discovery, reading novels from the old man’s bookshelf and discovering what it means to care for someone and how to put that indescribable feeling into words — although his maximalist style doesn’t always mesh with these intimate moments.
His regular collaborators delight in the crazed gusto and macabre opulence of the story. Kate Hawley’s costumes flap elegantly in the winter breeze. Alexandre Desplat’s score screeches like a wounded animal. Tamara Deverell’s production design is very on brand for del Toro: castles the size of cities, interior spaces decked out with skulls, velvet carpets, paintings of severed heads and Medusa screaming into the lonely abyss. It’s all very transporting and eye-catching, but it distracts from the intimate scenes between Frankenstein and his lonely creation.
While del Toro has made this all his own, a Frankenstein movie rests on the hunched shoulders of the man who plays the monster. Elordi’s creature is soulful yet sorrowful, rueful yet handsome, an Adonis-like sculpture that whimpers like a starving puppy. He’s a lumbering contradiction in the Shelley vein, a revolting killing machine who wants nothing more than to live. In fact, Elordi’s character is more a reflection of the watery, anguished eyes of the scarred woman in Eyes Without a Face, a lyrical horror film about a girl who’s lost her skin in a car accident and her father, trying to bring her daughter back to society, skins his captors for their facial features. This was a monumental discovery for del Toro. Like James Whale’s Frankenstein, it helped del Toro realize the emotion in the egregious, the heart in the horror, the poetry in the perverse, the ornate in the outcast. Del Toro and Elordi have brought those attributes achingly to life here, even if his Paradise occasionally gets Lost under the ice of its own ambition.
“Frankenstein” is streaming on Netflix.