ONLY MONSTERS PLAY GOD.
The ”Dark Universe” project that Universal started crashed and burned with the release of The Mummy (2017), a critically maligned box-office flop. However, it’s nice to see things not go to waste. ”Dark Universe” recently became a part of Universal’s theme park where the monsters now conjure family-friendly scares for kids. And several of the ideas for the franchise did eventually turn into movies. One of them was hiring Guillermo del Toro to make his personal version of Mary Shelley’s ”Frankenstein”. And here we are, with the director once again confirming his status as the greatest maker of monsters in our time.
Stuck in ice
In 1857, a Danish ship sailing for the North Pole finds itself stuck in ice. Suddenly, the crew come across a badly wounded man who calls himself Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) who tells them to watch out for the creature that’s hunting him. It emerges, a hulk of a man who kills six of the crewmen without much of an effort and seems unfazed by any bullet that hits him.
After an attack that sinks the creature into icy water, Victor tells his story, taking us all the way back to his aristocratic upbringing, with a cold-hearted, demanding father (Charles Dance) who expects his son to follow in his path as a surgeon. Victor becomes obsessed with the idea of solving death and comes up with a way of reanimating corpses…
A dream project
The scene in the North Pole is a whopper of a beginning that reminds us of Kenneth Branagh’s attempt to reimagine Shelley’s story for the screen in 1994. That film wasn’t very good, but del Toro did like Frank Darabont’s script. This became a dream project of his, and as in so many of his previous films that depicted sad monsters, del Toro was after the pure tragedy of ”Frankenstein”, something that he also saw in Boris Karloff’s portrait of the monster in the 1931 adaptation.
Jacob Elordi turned out to be quite the gift.
Choosing the style and right actor for the part is a daunting challenge, but Jacob Elordi turned out to be quite the gift. His Promethean figure is many things. A colleague of mine called him the sexiest Frankenstein’s monster she’d ever seen. He’s also vulnerable and childlike, as in the early stages after his awakening where he tries to connect with his maker, who’s increasingly frustrated over his creature’s inability to say anything other than ”Vic…tor”. And the monster is also terrifying, when he gets angry or desperate, or bitterly resentful as in the film’s second half when he sets out to punish Victor as cruelly as possible. Elordi is magnificent to behold and crafts an impressive performance. Overall, it’s a good cast, with Isaac as the heartless, insane creator and Christoph Waltz as his capitalist benefactor who has ulterior motives.
The film is divided into several chapters, all of which are gorgeously designed and enrich the story; two of them are told first from Victor’s perspective, then from the Creature’s, seamlessly moving things forward. Colorful costumes, overwhelming sets and bloody showdowns help keep us entertained throughout.
I should say that fans of the novel will be pleased, but judging from social media posts in the days after the film’s premiere on Netflix, I’m not so sure. People will always come up with reasons why a movie isn’t sufficiently respectful of the material it was based upon. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter; a film that does its own thing well certainly deserves to be lauded. Del Toro’s Frankenstein is loyal to the themes and events of Shelley’s work, while also reinvigorating a 200-year-old horror story.
Frankenstein 2025-U.S. 150 min. Color. Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Novel: Mary Shelley. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Music: Alexandre Desplat. Production Design: Tamara Deverell. Costume Design: Kate Hawley. Cast: Oscar Isaac (Victor Frankenstein), Jacob Elordi (The Creature), Mia Goth (Elizabeth Harlander/Claire Frankenstein), Felix Kammerer, Christoph Waltz, David Bradley, Lars Mikkelsen, Charles Dance… Ralph Ineson.
Trivia: Co-produced by del Toro. At earlier points, Doug Jones and Benedict Cumberbatch were considered for the part of the Creature. Andrew Garfield was cast in that role, but bowed out. Dance also played the father in Victor Frankenstein (2015).
BAFTA: Best Production Design, Costume Design, Makeup & Hair.
Last word: “In the first 10 minutes people have to say, ’This is not the ‘Frankenstein’ I know. I’m going to stay and see what happens.’ We did that with Pinocchio, by setting it in Mussolini’s Italy. I could practise with [the character] Nomak in Blade II, an encounter between a monster and his father, saying, ‘Why did you make me like this? Why did you cast me aside?’ But this is the granddaddy, this the big opera. This is the Puccini version of those tales. I wanted it to be grand and beautiful and spectacular, not only in size or scope, but also in trying a performance with the Creature that had never been done. Jacob brings a purity.” (del Toro, Little White Lies)