Frankenstein: A Modern Re-Retelling
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is filled with storytellers—not only does our good doctor (Oscar Isaac) get a chance to tell his tale, but so does his creation (Jacob Elordi). While the arrangement of del Toro’s adaptation is devoted to these two, the most crucial storyteller ends up being an old, blind man (David Bradley). He isn’t given a name (then again, neither is Frankenstein’s creation), but the movie hinges on his expansive grasp of religion, myth, and literature. It is this old man who tells another character to reach for Milton’s Paradise Lost, simultaneously voicing the heart of del Toro’s creation: “Even God has questions.”
Frankenstein begins with a brief prelude in the Arctic before returning us to Victor Frankenstein’s gloomy childhood. A father who was violent and demanding—and a renowned doctor; a mother who brought him joy but died and left him in sadness. These rather obvious wounds give Victor his sense of purpose: to staunch the lust of death.
It is, of course, hard to lack familiarity with this tale, at least by cultural osmosis if not through engagement with Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel or James Whale’s 1930s film, which created many signifiers than have become sediment in cultural imagination. Victor, with the aid of a wealthy and determined benefactor, builds his laboratory, pieces together fragments of dead men, harnesses lightning, and creates life. Death has been conquered—yet death will inevitably follow, haunting Victor and those in his orbit. It will even haunt the creature, albeit in a very different way.
Narratively and conceptually, del Toro’s adaptation hews closely to Shelley’s work. Both are more interested in the consequences of Frankenstein’s achievement than in the means; ultimately, both tease out the humanity in the creature against the callousness of the doctor. Although “tease out” is too subtle a phrase for del Toro’s sensibilities: his thematics are overt, with a myriad of allusions to Genesis, Prometheus (also referenced by Shelley’s subtitle), Byron, and more. The strength of the movie is not in a new approach to the story—del Toro is too much a classicist to radically subvert Shelley’s work—but in the lush imagery that del Toro conjures and in the purposefully operatic performances of Isaac, Elordi, and the rest of the cast (which includes Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz). Shelley’s tale is in fact tailor made for del Toro’s Gothic maximalism, and the themes Frankenstein provides are ones that he’s been exploring throughout his filmography.
The first camera movement in the prelude is a quick reminder that del Toro knows better than most of his contemporaries how to craft an epic scope. The sweep up through a snowscape to a ship trapped in ice prefigures the other grand images to come: an absurd tower alone in a lush plain, the crash of lightning against glowing scientific apparatuses, and a bloody, fiery visage of an angel of wrath. There is a near constant visual play of light and dark, of fire against the deep night.
The material also gives del Toro the opportunity for leaning into the brutality of the scenario. Explicit violence has always gone hand in hand with a sense of hubris in his oeuvre, and these have often been well tuned (Pan’s Labyrinth) but occasionally ill fitting. Here, the story demands it. The scene of Victor carving through corpses is appropriately grotesque, with puddles of blood for an aftermath. Bones twist and tendons squelch, skulls shatter and blood flows and flows and flows.
The actors are game for such over the top events. Isaac is characteristically sharp, exuding more disdain and simpering pride than the dialogue alone provides. Yet also more ache: even in his resignation, there’s a depth of emotion and awe at his creation. Elordi gives a standout performance of the creature, especially in the final section of the film. His physical maneuvering of a creature unfamiliar with life in this (mish mash) body of his works well, but the film is strongest once he gains a real voice. They each lean into the full fledged grandeur, never hesitating or shying away from the overt nature of the script. Goth is fine, though she’s given the weakest parts of the script, and her Elizabeth is mostly held up as the object of fixation and amazement by both the doctor and the creature.
The explicit nature of the script and the direct thematics may present an obstacle for some. “Can you contain your fire, Prometheus?” Victor is asked, and we know the answer. The doctor intends to “stop death entirely” (the foibles of transhumanism, anyone?). He comments that there is “no spiritual content in tissue,” but that’s precisely what the film is here to test. All of the plot points are thickly foreshadowed and intelligible an hour before they occur. But again, this is Frankenstein—was there ever any mystery?
Del Toro’s anachronisms are still present—characters vocalize ideas they certainly would not have held or communicated in that way. Thus the craving for life is transmuted into a modern framework of individuality that’s alien to this world (even if the Romantics are laying some seeds for it). But these moments don’t undercut the film as they do in Nightmare Alley, where they weakened the punch of the story’s critique. Frankenstein’s ideas still bolster Shelley’s interrogation.
Victor Frankenstein looks at his creation and sees that it is an abomination. What does such a genesis do to the mind and heart of such a creature? The creature is thrown into a world it is not yet ready for, and Victor is in no way prepared for fatherhood. In playing God, a man becomes a devil. In staunching death, blood somehow flows all the more swiftly. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein revels in the mythological diorama that Shelley gives to him, where grand (if familiar) ideas clash, where awe meets awful violence, where humanity meets God meets the demonic. This is del Toro’s conflagration, and it sure is riveting to stare into that Promethean fire.
