Josh Reviews Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro is one of my favorite filmmakers. Hellboy in 2004 made me a fan for life, and it’s been great fun following Mr. del Toro’s career ever since. I don’t think any other living filmmaker loves monsters quite the way Mr. del Toro does, and he has created some of the most beautiful and heartbreaking monster stories I’ve ever seen. (2017’s The Shape of Water is a high-water mark, pun intended, and it’s still pleasingly incredible to me that that film connected with mainstream audiences to the degree that it did, including winning the Academy Award for Best Picture!) So it’s no surprise that Mr. del Toro seems to have a deep love for Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. He’s been talking in interviews for years about wanting to create a new adaptation.
Supported by Netflix, Mr. del Toro’s Frankenstein has finally arrived, and it is a wonderful film. sweeping and spellbinding. Would I prefer Mr. del Toro be creating original stories with all-new monsters and creatures? Well, yes, I would. But if he’s finding joy in creating new versions of classic monster/fantasy stories like Pinocchio and now Frankenstein, when they’re at this level of quality, who am I to complain?
Mr. del Toro has always been an incredibly inventive visualist. His films — and most especially the fantasy creatures who populate them — always have brilliantly creative and original looks. I was hoping that would continue to be the case here with Frankenstein, and wow is it ever. This is perhaps Mr. del Toro’s greatest achievement in this film: he has completely shed the shackles of the iconography of the classic Universal version of Frankenstein. The imagery of that film and its sequels (The Bride of Frankenstein, etc.) — particularly the look of the monster — have become iconic and extremely well-known. I love how Mr. del Toro and his team managed to completely put aside those well-known visuals, creating a film with a look and feel entirely its own.
Oscar Isaac (A Most Violent Year, Show Me a Hero, Moon Knight, Dune) delivers a fierce, magnetic performance as Victor Frankenstein. It’s a pleasure to see Mr. Isaac, whose work I have always enjoyed, throw himself so completely into this role. He’s compelling as Victor; we can see early on that his brilliance is (un)balanced by a petulant bitterness and selfishness (though the film wisely allows us to spend a good chunk of time with Victor as a child, in which we can see how the tragedies of his childhood shaped the man he would become), which then curdles into madness and rage as the story unfolds. I loved this performance!
Then there is Jacob Elordi, who is wonderful as the Creature. Mr. Elordi brings a perfect gentle soulfulness to the Creature. And he’s able to channel fearsome rage at times as well. So much of this character is brought to life through Mr. Elordi’s wonderfully expressive eyes. Many actors might not be able to ensure their emotions can shine through these types of elaborate make-up and effects, but Mr. Elordi delivers a masterful, memorable performance. His work is enhanced by the beautiful design of the Creature by Mr. del Toro and his team. Making us forget about the familiar “Frankenstein” look might have been one of the central challenges of creating this film, but they have succeeded brilliantly. I love the look of the Creature! It balances gruesomeness and beauty into a perfect balance. We get the clear sense that this Creature’s body was stitched together from many different parts of different corpses. That could have been horrific, but in this film Victor Frankenstein shares Guillermo del Toro’s skills as an artist and master of his craft, and so the design is not horrific at all, but almost beautiful. (Remember, Victor and his sponsor Henrich Harlander’s goal was to create a perfect human body!) I also loved the look of the energy-channeling devices that Victor creates, to bring life to his Creature. The chest-piece we see over the Creature early in the process was really cool. (I should also make note of several striking images, before the Creature is brought to life, of its body, mostly assembled but with its back entirely split open, as Victor works to establish all the right connections needed to bring life to this inanimate flesh. That image has really stuck with me since seeing the film. That particular image definitely leans more to the horrific, but Mr. del Toro keeps it strange and fantastical rather than totally of the “avert your eyes” variety.)
As I’ve already noted, the classic image of Frankenstein’s monster from the Universal films is iconic and memorable. So too is Frankenstein’s lab where the monster is brought to life. Here too, I was so impressed by the totally new and original design that Mr. del Toro and his team created, both for Victor’s original work-space in Edinburgh and then for the the tower inside which he brings his work to fruition. I loved how beautifully this location was brought to life — from the top of the tower, to the huge shaft running through it, to Victor’s laboratory (with that striking enormous stone carving of the face of Medusa), to the basement where the Creature is, for a time, imprisoned. Each of those locations was memorable and iconic, and brought to gorgeous life. I love seeing Mr. del Toro working in this gothic tone (as he did previously in Crimson Peak).
This entire film is a visual feast for the eyes. I look forward to revisiting it and being able to pay more attention to all of the beautiful costumes, props, and settings.
I enjoyed the structure of the film, in which we shift perspectives midway through from Victor to the Creature. That was cleverly done. I love that this story belongs to BOTH of them, rather than exclusively one or the other. (I did notice a few narrative cheats in the Creature’s half of the story, in which we see Victor in moments when the Creature wasn’t right there, but I could go with that.)
While this film sits on the shoulders of the performances of Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, the rest of the ensemble is wonderful as well. Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, Spectre) is entertaining as Victor’s patron, the wealthy Henrich Harlander. (I loved Mr. Waltz’s smooth delivery of the Godfather-like moment in which Henrich smoothly gives Victor a version of the “one day, and that day may never come, I may ask you for a favor” line.) Mia Goth doesn’t have much screen time, but she does a nice job bringing life and personality to Elizabeth, who is the object of affection for all the main male characters in the film. Felix Kammerer hits all the right notes as Victor’s gentle younger brother William. We need to like and care for William, as Victor does, rather than being annoyed or bored by him, and Mr. Kammerer’s performance accomplishes that. Lars Mikkelsen (Grand Admiral Thrawn in Ahsoka) turns what could have been a nothing role — Captain Andersen, whose main role in the movie is to sit and listen to the stories being told by Victor and the Creature — into a memorable character. Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) gets to portray yet another asshole dad as Victor & William’s father, Baron Leopold Frankenstein. David Bradley is well-known for playing scary characters (Walder Frey in Game of Thrones and Argus Filch in the Harry Potter films), but he’s great here as the kindly old blind man who is one of the few people who show kindness to the Creature. (I will admit, though, that as soon as I saw that exterior shot of the small farm-house, I knew what was coming and my mind jumped to Gene Hackman in Young Frankenstein!)
I feel like this film has gone somewhat under the radar during the end of the year awards season (possibly because it had a tiny theatrical release before being released on Netflix — click here to watch it now), but Frankenstein is a wonderful film and stands among the many great works by Guillermo del Toro.
Please support my website by clicking through one of my Amazon links the next time you need to shop! As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. That means I’ll receive a small percentage from ANY product you purchase from Amazon within 24 hours after clicking through. Thank you!