Frankenstein – Guillermo del Toro

In 19th-century Geneva, ambitious surgeon Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) defies nature by assembling a towering creature from scavenged human remains and animating it during a raging storm. When the being (Jacob Elordi) awakens to a world of horror and isolation, it embarks on a relentless pursuit of its creator, unraveling a tale of creation, abandonment, vengeance, and the fragile line between monster and man amid fog-choked Victorian shadows.

Frankenstein Review

In 1816, an 18-year-old Mary Shelley and a group of friends were challenged by the famed poet and their bosom companion, Lord Byron, to write a ghost story. According to the introduction to the revised 1931 edition of her now-legendary novel Frankenstein, a few days later, Shelley dreamt of a man who was dead, but not. It was a nightmare that inspired a tale copied, parodied, and retold in every conceivable medium for over two hundred years.

                   

Guillermo del Toro has made a reputation for himself as an imaginative filmmaker whose predilection for dark fantasy and gothic horror colors the breadth of his most acclaimed work. Frankenstein, a tale forged in the sooty furnaces of the Industrial Revolution—where men of iron amassed golden empires while attempting to make themselves gods among men- seems a natural fit for the Guatemalan native. However, if one looks objectively at del Toro’s body of work, one could make the case that his narratives peaked with 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, a hauntingly beautiful dark fantasy that masterfully weaves allegory with mythic imagination. Since that time, the writer/director’s aesthetic sensibilities have arguably calcified—still as darkly gorgeous as ever, but so familiar that they now seem to compensate for the diminishing ambition of the stories beneath them.

A novel of modest length, Shelley’s original work and its slightly longer 1831 revision, leave very little time for the extraneous. However, the same cannot be said for del Toro and crew’s retelling. At two and a half hours, Netflix’s Frankenstein is slightly overlong, and that’s most evident in Christopher Waltz’s character’s arc. Waltz plays the wealthy Harlander, Victor’s wealthy benefactor and uncle of the film’s love interest, Elizabeth. He’s a man as nearly obsessed with  Victor’s mad scientific theories as Victor himself, but with far more immediate concerns. Waltz is the type of thoughtful, internalized performer who can make even the weakest script bearable, and while his performance is strong, his dialogue crisp, and Guillermo’s ability to move a story forward does a credible job of masking it, Waltz’s character is completely unnecessary and feels like a third appended needlessly, if masterfully stitched on.

Elizabeth’s slight modernization—and the pointless addition of a love triangle between Victor, his brother, and her—adds nothing but minutes. Narratively, it actively harms the story. In the novel, Elizabeth is Victor’s maternal cousin, adopted into the family after her mother’s death. Raised alongside him with the expectation they would eventually marry, their bond forms the emotional core of the book’s latter half and its conclusion. Omitting that connection already dulls much of the film’s impact, but introducing her halfway through as Victor’s brother’s fiancée strips her character of any real weight. Worse, the film then spends considerable time on Victor effectively trying to cuckold his brother, robbing him of the very traits meant to secure audience sympathy and weakening the story’s final act.

So what works, and why did we rate the film so highly? Viewed on its own, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is an entertaining, gorgeously shot film with standout performances from its main cast. Despite a flawed script, Oscar Isaac makes the most of his selfish, obsessed Dr. Frankenstein—a “most” only limited by modern cinema’s constraints, which have deprived audiences of the career his talent deserves. The rising Jacob Elordi, as the monster, delivers a surprisingly romantic turn. While it lacks the visceral rage of Robert De Niro’s take 30 years ago, the fault lies in Frankenstein’s writers, not Elordi. Beneath more than forty prosthetic pieces painstakingly applied over ten-hour days, he conveys subtle nuance, longing, and pain, drawing the audience in and making even his silences rich with meaning.

Ultimately, del Toro’s Frankenstein is a film of contradictions: visually sumptuous, emotionally compelling in parts, yet weighed down by unnecessary narrative flourishes and modernizations that dilute the story’s core. It is a movie that thrives when its performers and imagery take center stage, and falters when its plot attempts to expand beyond what Mary Shelley’s tightly woven original demanded. Even so, the film succeeds as a testament to del Toro’s enduring visual imagination and the undeniable charisma of its leads. While it may never achieve the narrative precision of the source material—or the raw emotional intensity of earlier cinematic interpretations—it is, at its best, a hauntingly beautiful retelling that reminds audiences why Shelley’s tale has endured for over two centuries.

WOKE REPORT

Nothing…more or less

• del Toro’s obvious reverence for the source material precludes him from straying too far and poisoning it with modern progressivism.
  • If there’s a single instance of wokeness, it is that, where, in the original, the character of Elizabeth embodied the traditional 19th-century feminine ideal, Guillermo made his Elizabeth a lover of science with an astute scientific mind. I only took a point off the Woke-O-Meter because it’s such a slapdash, forgettable addition that I did forget it until I looked at my notes.