“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” wrote Mary Shelley in the introduction to the 1831 edition of her 1818 novel Frankenstein. In the years since the book’s publication, the monster at the center of that Gothic bestseller has ventured forth countless more times from his creator’s unholy lair, prospering in the form of film adaptations, comic books, sketch-show parodies, and Halloween-costume impersonations. Shelley’s story has become one of the foundational myths of modernity: The tale of the arrogant scientist Victor Frankenstein and his nameless and tragic creation was written amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, but it seems to retain its metaphorical power through every technological advance that has come since. The advent of the railroads, the harnessing of electrical power, the invention of the automobile, the airplane, the computer, and, in the 21st century, artificial intelligence could all stand in as handy real-world symbols of the struggle between scientific progress and the human connections—to nature, to our own best selves, and to other people—that progress threatens to imperil.
Guillermo del Toro has dreamed of telling his own version of the Frankenstein story since he was too young to conceive of being a filmmaker. He has described seeing the 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the creature, as one of the formative moments of his early childhood. Throughout del Toro’s career, the stories he’s told have shared characteristics with Frankenstein: Fantasy tales like Pan’s Labyrinth, the Hellboy movies, and The Shape of Water explored the relationship between human characters and the magical or monstrous beings they encounter, while Crimson Peak and Nightmare Alley leaned into Gothic-style melodrama and sumptuously macabre set and costume design.
Del Toro’s grand-scale yet deeply personal retelling of the Frankenstein myth is a kind of omnibus edition that contains elements from many previous versions: not only parts of the novel that are usually left out of filmed adaptations, but homages to Whale’s Frankenstein and its sequel Bride of Frankenstein, nods to the campy Frankenstein series from Britain’s low-budget Hammer Film Productions in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and a creature design inspired by Bernie Wrightson’s celebrated illustrations in a 1983 edition of Shelley’s book.
Like the novel, del Toro’s Frankenstein starts with a frame story set in the Arctic. A ship on an expedition to the North Pole gets frozen into the sea ice, and as the crew attempts to free the ship by breaking up the ice around it, an explosion in the distance draws their attention. When a team is sent to investigate, they find a badly injured man next to a flaming tent and a team of sled dogs. This turns out to be Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), who, once brought back to the ship and warmed by a fire in the captain’s quarters, unfolds his story to the ship’s Danish commander, Capt. Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen). Midway through, the film’s perspective will shift to that of the creature, who informs us of events that his creator was not present to witness.
Victor’s story begins with an extended flashback to his childhood, spent in baronial splendor on a lavish estate with a controlling and abusive father (Charles Dance), a famed doctor who insists his son (played as a young teen by Christian Convery) follow in his footsteps by pursuing a career in the natural sciences. Victor’s loving but frail mother is played by Mia Goth, who will return in a much larger role in the movie’s second half. When she dies giving birth to his younger brother, Victor swears vengeance on God, determining that he will make it his life’s work to conquer death itself.
Flashing forward to 1855, we find an adult Victor lecturing at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. He demonstrates his early working model for a plan to use electricity to reanimate dead human tissue. The results, though still primitive, are both gruesomely successful and, to the august and bewigged members of the society, shockingly obscene. Victor withdraws to pursue his research in secret, but he’s soon approached by a wealthy would-be patron, the arms dealer Herr Harlander (Christoph Waltz). Harlander promises to underwrite the spooky castle-tower laboratory of Victor’s dreams, nominally for science but in fact for sinister motives yet to be disclosed.
Elordi brings the familiar archetype new shades that previous screen renditions haven’t explored.
Del Toro appears to have changed the historical period of the novel from the early to the mid-19th century in part so as to set the story against the backdrop of the Crimean War, a choice that adds a new dimension of evil to Victor’s depraved quest. Instead of gathering the body parts for his patched-together life form from graveyards and morgues, this Dr. Frankenstein seeks them principally on the fields of recent battles, making for a grisly montage that may be too much for the gore-averse viewer. But del Toro’s camera (the cinematographer is Nightmare Alley’s Dan Laustsen) finds genuine beauty in the meticulously flayed corpses in Frankenstein’s lab. The director’s passion for the intricate symmetries of the human anatomical system rivals the doctor’s own, and these scenes of research and experimentation, backed by Alexandre Desplat’s richly orchestrated symphonic score, make for one of the movie’s most satisfying stretches. The look of the lab in which the monster is created, part of the phenomenal set design by Tamara Deverell, borrows heavily from Whale’s Frankenstein, with its lightning-activated megabattery and bandage-wrapped monster laid out on a table. (In a touch of the Christian symbolism that del Toro, unsubtly and characteristically, sprinkles through the film, this time the creature is strapped to a gurney that resembles a cross.)
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It’s a solid hour into this two-hour-and-29-minute-long movie before the hulking form on that gurney is unveiled to the viewer, and damned if it isn’t Jacob Elordi, the lanky Australian heartthrob who recently played Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and is set to appear as Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. When I first heard about this casting, I feared that Elordi would be wrong for the part. Though the actor’s 6’5” frame does fit Shelley’s description of the creature’s “gigantic stature,” Frankenstein’s monster is generally pictured more as a lumbering golem than as a graceful dreamboat. But as it turns out, both Elordi’s physique and temperament suit the role perfectly, bringing the familiar archetype new shades that previous screen renditions haven’t explored. His monster is, like Shelley’s, a hero of the Romantic era, longing for companionship and transcendence. Where Karloff’s lovable but cognitively challenged creature got no further than smiling when he looked at a daisy, Elordi’s (like Shelley’s) is out there teaching himself to read and becoming a devotee of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The character of Victor is just as gorgeously interpreted. Isaac plays him with a kind of nihilistic rock-star flair, aided by Kate Hawley’s spectacular and at times wittily anachronistic costume design: plaid pants, billowing neck ruffles, scarlet gloves. But del Toro’s script does Victor a disservice by giving the adult version of the character too few chances to revisit the insecurity and loneliness that drove him in his youth. Every moment we spend with Isaac’s Victor, he is more or less in the same state of fevered obsession with his hellish ambition: For the first half of the movie, to create life from death, and for the second half, to find and destroy the being his experiments have brought about. Even for the brief stretch in which he appears to be falling for his brother’s fiancée Elizabeth (Mia Goth again), Victor remains imperious, controlling, and rigid, treating everyone (but the monster especially) with cold disdain. Del Toro’s intention here seems to be to trace the character’s emotional remoteness back to the familial trauma passed on from his childhood. But if we’re meant to regard Victor with as much antipathy as we did his jerk of a father, the late scenes where the scientist and his creation finally come face-to-face lose much of their emotional power.
This Frankenstein seems designed to be a moody steampunk melodrama as much as it is a horror movie. There are no real scares in the traditional everyone-in-the-audience-screams-at-once sense, only a prevailing aura of melancholy and dread. Yet the overall effect is not bleak or stark but almost overwhelmingly lavish. Del Toro’s primary interest is less in plot than in color, texture, atmosphere, and tone. Over and over, shapes and images seen in one scene recur in different forms later on. The waxen anatomical figures Victor is fascinated by as a child become flesh-and-blood cadavers in his lab. The insects that Elizabeth studies and draws are suggested by the patterns and fabrics of her wildly luxuriant outfits: acid-green silks and iridescent jewel-toned veils, always worn with a bright-red cross that links her back to Victor’s permanently crimson-clad mother. Goth made her name as an art-house scream queen in Ti West’s X trilogy, and her air of self-possession, along with her gentle confidence upon first approaching the monster, sets her apart from earlier and less independent Elizabeths. But she, too, is not given a lot to do other than look like a pre-Raphaelite vision in a series of eye-popping getups, a task she acquits herself of admirably.
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Though I was consistently dazzled by the care and craft with which Frankenstein was made, including the many practical effects done with miniature sets and, for the sailing sequences, a full-size reproduction of a whaling ship mounted on a giant gimbal, I found myself entering into the film’s dramatic world mainly when Elordi’s monster was on-screen. The actor has said he studied the Japanese theater form Butoh in preparing for the role, and at times his balletic movements resemble those of the actor Doug Jones, who has long played the prosthetic-augmented monsters in del Toro’s films: the amphibious sidekick Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies, the horrifying Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, the river-dwelling love interest in The Shape of Water. Elordi’s movements are elegant but also somehow childlike. When the monster observes any expression of affection, like an old man patting his granddaughter’s head, he reenacts the gesture on himself as a way of experiencing the love he never found in the world. It’s a motif that could easily have turned sentimental, but the actor performs it with such simplicity and truth that it’s heartbreaking anew each time.
This Frankenstein speaks the language of old-style Hollywood spectacle rather than of the contemporary creature feature, and I wonder if fans of the genre who don’t share del Toro’s passion for its cultural history will relate to the movie’s romantic sensibility and ultimately tragic conclusion. One feature of this version’s monster that’s unusual if not unique is that, to his own despair, he can never be killed. Over the course of the movie, he is stabbed, drowned, shot with a blunderbuss, and blown up with a stick of dynamite, yet he emerges from the fray with his wounds already healing, physically if not spiritually ready to press onward. Frankenstein itself is a similarly indestructible property. Del Toro has made a version of the story that’s indelible, but not definitive. If the lush beauty and soulful yearning of this one is not what you wanted from an adaptation, sit tight and another will soon come lumbering into view.
