Guillermo del Toro Successfully Shapes a Monster, But Fails To Move Man.
Based on Mary Shelley’s gothic tale of the same name, Frankenstein follows a young and obsessed scientist who takes his experiment too far – and creates a monster.
Guillermo del Toro is the reigning gothic king. With films like Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), The Shape of Water (2017) and even Pinocchio (2022), he’s proven time and again that he understands how to create visually arresting worlds filled with horror and heart. Adapting Shelley’s, Frankenstein with that same twisted eye should have been a walk in the park – and in some area it is.
Frankenstein is visually stunning. The flowing blood-red of Victor’s mother’s dress, the elaborate cold marble coffins, the isolated dark tower – the movie is a shadowed, vibrant fairytale of death, desire, and obsession. This extends to the casting of the two leads. There is a physically striking height disparity between Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and his Creature (Jacob Elordi) – 8inches if you were curious – which adds to the immersiveness of del Toro’s world.
Elordi is unrecognisable as the creature; delivering a haunting performance that balances innocence with rage – remarkable for a character who barely speaks for most of the film.
Despite the consistent gothic atmosphere achieved by the costume and set design, where this film falters is in its structure and hollow contents. Narration is used as a key storytelling device, but it interrupts the flow of Victor’s woeful tale and made an already lengthy film feel even longer. The persistent voiceover combined with a clear-cut chapter divider (where the perspective flips from Victor’s POV to the Creature’s), act as crutches that slow down the pace for an audience perfectly capable of keeping up without them.
The same can be said for Victor’s characterisation. While this adaption remains broadly faithful to Shelley’s novel, it loses sight of Victor himself. His obsession on creating life and forgetting to live, the fraught father/son tones between man and monster who he treats as a pet and his inevitable unravelling. These are the meat and bones of the story that draw you in, but they are relegated to moments rather given any true emotionally weight.
Victor’s disillusionment once he’d reached the peak of his ambition is glossed over in favour of a side quest featuring Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) a character created for this adaptation who has his own motives for funding Victor’s experiments.
Amid all the testosterone pumping through the film, Mia Goth was a saccharine note of femininity. Her dual role as Victor’s mother and his brother’s fiancée, who he desires, is a bold choice best left to a psychologist to unpack.
Frankenstein, is named after the man, unfortunately in this adaptation despite the complexity of his character we feel nothing towards him – which is disappointing as we spend much of the film in his shoes. Comparatively, with the Creature, del Toro is successful at capturing a gothic tragedy about being born into cruelty but choosing love with a vulnerability that is deeply human.
Perhaps the movie would have been better served with the Creature as its central character.
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