Review by C.J. Bunce
No question about it–I was surprised watching director/auteur Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited adaption of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Netflix production now on the streaming platform. If you’ve read about del Toro you know this subject is one he holds dearly in the development of his interests and the style of his dark movies, movies he usually writes: Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water, with Hellboy and The Hobbit as the exceptions. Quite simply there is no subject more suited to the imagination of del Toro than a dark, Gothic, red-spattered iteration of Frankenstein’s monster chasing his creator across the frozen tundra. My surprise? del Toro didn’t lean into himself as much as I expected. In fact despite some choices that veered away from Mary Shelley’s novel, his movie is an understated, faithful adaptation of the book.
After the bloody red viscera paraded throughout his Crimson Peak, I fully expected a Tarantino-esque, operatic display of body parts, approaching the stuff of slasher horror. But I should have known better, as del Toro is neither Tarantino nor a cheap purveyor of horror movies. Certainly his display of star Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein collecting and assembling parts is unlike anything a mainstream Frankenstein production has yet paraded before its audience. You wouldn’t put it on a network TV re-broadcast. But like Victor’s audience of scholars at the beginning of the movie, it’s presented in a passive way, deliberately revealed and not always in an in-your-face, shock-and-awe fashion. The extent of it all mirrors that National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project, the one that toured cities revealing preserved, actual human organs and systems.
Yes, the most horrific scene finds Victor discussing an exposed cadaver on his Victorian office table to the fascination of his would-be sister-in-law. The surprise is that this as horrifying as it gets, but it’s still body horror and still gory enough I’m not going to include photographs here (see it for yourself for that). The way del Toro sticks to Victor as mid-19th century scientist, which would be a pretty disgusting affair for even an average doctor, somehow works.
Circumstances involving Victor’s father, played by British staple Charles Dance, the death of his mother, played by newcomer Mia Goth, and Victor’s relationship with brother William, played by All Quiet on the Western Front star Felix Kammerer, are all reconfigured from the source material, but not in any way that alters the key narrative choices. A more intriguing choice sees Mia Goth cast as both Victor and William’s mother and William’s fiancee Elizabeth. This is the ill-fated Elizabeth of the novel.
Oscar Isaac could not be better as the manic mad scientist. Like the entire film, Isaac delivers a reserved performance even as he parades barker style a very del Toro biological automaton creation in front of a hall of skeptics–even as he breathlessly recounts Victor’s story to a sea captain at the North Pole in probably the finest visual presentation of the framing section of the story. Perhaps Isaac was prepared for the role from his similar character in Ex Machina?
So how’s the creature, the monster himself? As with Isaac’s Victor and the epic, believable North Pole sequences, this is another piece he gets precisely right. Jacob Elordi plays Frankenstein’s monster in the considered, passionate manner as found in the source material. As much as we all love the Universal Studios classic monster, del Toro departs with the clunky, addled Creature and opts instead for a more dynamic, del Toro-esque fantasy-feeling character that could have been played by Paul Bettany or The Shape of Water actor Doug Jones. Where del Toro leans into his signature style is seeing the Creature as rampager, throwing men across a room, tearing through beasts, ripping people apart in a style more Hulk than Hellboy.
Still, much of the movie lacks excitement. At nearly two and a half hours it runs too long. I think the most memorable element from Frankenstein movies of the past among most fans of the subject matter is the lightning sequence igniting the Creature with life, filmed with Colin Clive and Boris Karloff for the classic Universal Studios movie then re-imagined with Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle for Young Frankenstein. That sequence probably will never be surpassed as iconic American science fiction cinema. No angry mob scene, no drowning victim. The creation montage for the Creature seems rushed. I wish del Toro did something to make the movie more his own, spinning more of the moviemaking magic into it as he brought to Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. Although that self-guided automaton was spot on.
So the movie arrives at more of a literary curiosity for anyone willing to give it the time, to analyze and study the choices del Toro has made. It’s not a monster movie for kids, but neither are his other movies, Hellboy excepted. But he does give the movie the same faithful, careful handling Kenneth Branagh gave his version, and the same care Branagh or anyone would give a Shakespeare adaptation or similar important work of literature. But he may have done this at the expense of adding energy, excitement, and any freshness to the story we’ve all seen so many times before.
del Toro includes a stellar showcase of supporting characters featuring some of Europe’s master genre thespians: Christoph Walz as a key benefactor, David Bradley as the blind father, Burn Gorman as an executioner, Lars Mikkelsen as the sea captain, and Ralph Ineson as one of Victor’s professors. Alexandre Desplat’s score lacks the energy, excitement, and romance of previous Frankenstein movie music (you may be able to still hum the haunting violin from Young Frankenstein). But Dan Laustsen’s cinematography, Tamara Deverell’s environments, Kate Hawley’s costumes, and the entire makeup crew delivered what you’d expect from a movie with del Toro’s name on the marquee. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is streaming now on Netflix.
