FRANKENSTEIN
2025
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley)
I've been holding back this fart for a long time now, and I think when I let it out it'll be bad enough to clear the room: I've come to actively dislike Guillermo del Toro as a filmmaker, a feeling at least partly multiplied by his position in pop culture, this nerd icon whose merest banalities get repeated like divine wisdom, and whose movies have come to be treated by his fans not only as events (and by the Academy as automatic Oscar nominees), but as brave stands against whatever it is about modern cinema you don't like, particularly its absence of independent spirit and its reluctance to pursue originality in its stories. Well, Frankenstein, released more-or-less exclusively on the home to all our best and most enduring feature films these days, Netflix, represents the director's fourth feature in a row that's for all intents and purposes a remake, either implicitly (The Shape of Water is an unavowed remake of Creature From the Black Lagoon's sequel, Revenge of the Creature), or perplexingly overtly (Nightmare Alley), or otherwise as a readaptation of such incredibly frequently-adapted material that del Toro's Pinocchio shared 2022 with two (is it three?) other Pinocchio adaptations, and the only reason his Frankenstein does not share a calendar year with another titular riff on Mary Shelley's creation (and I am not at all sure it actually doesn't) is because, to all appearances, Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! got bullied off the release schedule by this very movie, even though Gyllenhaal's film sure looks more imaginative and interesting.
This rut he's been in since the marvelous Crimson Peak, an extended spell of self-indulgence (and, spoiled as del Toro might be, self-indulgence is one of the things you probably like about him and at one point what I liked about him), wouldn't be a problem, if its output were more like Shape of Water—you know, good, and creative, and weird—instead of boring, and bad, while even "bad" would be more tolerable if the worst thing about Shape of Water, its stumbles into if-you-make-the-subtext-text-you-won't-even-need-text storytelling hadn't become the primary thing about his Pinocchio and now his Frankenstein, which amounts to a lavishly illustrated book report regarding what del Toro (writing entirely solo for the first time since Hellboy) has identified as the themes of Frankenstein. And despite some liberties with Shelley's plot, he's mostly right, so I could just leave it to you to decide whether having someone brutely "solve" one of the more forthright major novels ever written, over and over, for 150 minutes (i.e., longer than both of James Whale's films combined) appeals to you, though if you've simply read the tagline ("only monsters play God") I don't know how you wouldn't find the movie itself superfluous, since it's basically that—it's only a little hyperbolic to call it literally that—the whole duration. Its approach is evident before it even really starts: in its feints towards book accuracy, we begin in the Arctic, where Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) does not begin his tale until he asks his rescuer and interlocutor if he knows what his given name means, and so we get a definition of "victor," albeit idiosyncratic since the first thing his new friend comes up with is "conqueror." In truth, it's evident before we ever meet Victor himself: that new friend, the captain (Lars Mikkelsen) of the Danish exploration vessel Horizont—a shift from the novel so seemingly arbitrary (is this DEI? have Danes received insufficient representation in cinema?) I feel like I must be missing something—having already been bellowing in his contempt for his crew's life-loving weakness that there is no turning back, and they will affront God by finding the top of His world, which obviously isn't verbatim and is, in its essentials, from the book. But Shelley wasn't this in-your-face about it, even though I've never thought The Modern Prometheus to be too subtle. It certainly doesn't repeatedly compare Victor to Prometheus. 130 minutes later, two characters in a row will inform Victor that he's the monster, and that is more-or-less verbatim.
In any case, we do have a figure arrogantly pursuing his passion, not for the improvement of the human condition but because he think only he has the genius equal to the task; in the movie, meanwhile, we have Victor and, incidentally, the captain previously known as Walton, who were at least right to believe no one had achieved their dreams already. Now, I'd never declare that we can't have Frankensteins. But Del Toro has made suggestions that his Frankenstein would, within artistic license, be a faithful rendition of the book, and I honestly I wish he'd felt he'd had a freer hand: there's a few ideas that are actually new here (and if one or both of the big ones might be massively expected from this writer-director, they'd be interesting if it ever serviced them—alright, there is one big new idea that is serviced, though I hate it). But let's make a disclosure: I'll admit that some of my resentment comes from the all-but-declared intention to actively replace the other "faithful rendition" of Shelley's novel, and even in the absence of specific insult, the fact of Kenneth Branagh's thirty-one year old, insistently-named Mary Shelley's Frankenstein would make me wonder why this one needed to exist, and while I want to assure you that watching it could've cured me of my bias, for as much as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein just runs circles around this one, I'm not certain that this Frankenstein would fully justify itself even if that Frankenstein was never made at all (wow, you've got the framing device on the boat! 19th century horror on a boat always works); of course, we do have the specific insult, del Toro making it known what a big fan he is of Frank Darabont's screenplay for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which Darabont has spent years telling us that Branagh somehow ruined. So, you know, the simplest way to put it is "fuck this guy."
It's a del Toro, though, so you're here for the sumptuous visuals and the heartfelt storytelling, though in both respects it's still a remake, only now of Crimson Peak and Shape of Water, except without the disciplined mastery or real emotionalism of the former, and without the genuine guts of the latter, and, just to say it straight, I think it's actually a strikingly ugly movie. A lot of that is del Toro and his cinematographer Dan Lausten taking their shared aesthetic into a place I simply don't like: del Toro is a big believer in practical effects and practical sets, but Lausten (maybe even Netflix, as it's a perennial problem there), between his razor-sharp digital photography, and the garish color correction that saturates in all the wrong ways, and the overmanicured neatness of production designer Tamara Deverell's "grotesquely" Gothic spaces (Victor's "laboratory" compound is just a worse, less geographically-and-emotionally-cohesive Crimson Peak, but still includes the hole in the ceiling) it all looks like CGI, and you can identify the actual CGI mainly because this $120 million movie suddenly looks like a composite of weightless objects and unpersuasive effects animations that a student whipped up over a weekend. (Del Toro traditionally hasn't sweated "bad" CGI, but this goes quite a bit beyond "storybook artifice" and straight into "maybe literally unfinished?")
The really unpleasant thing is this perpetual sunset that follows everyone around for all two-and-a-half hours, somehow still a big problem in the night scenes, del Toro and Lausten nurturing this desire to constantly backlight their figures with light so overwhelming that in about half the frames in the film the actual subject is "the blinding glare through a window"; probably somewhat relatedly, del Toro's losing track of his ability to even compose shots, sometimes because he's decided to hoist the camera up to get a look at these sets with the widest angle lens that won't completely distort the image (sometimes feeling a bit like he was a fan of The Favourite but hasn't the slightest intention of committing), and not infrequently putting his actors in the wrong place so the image is, in conjunction with all the visual elements clamoring for attention, unreadable. The fearsomely-backlit shots are the main offenders, but sometimes there'll be something as simple as introducing Mia Goth (or the second character Mia Goth plays), standing there contemplating a skull, so the foreground and background elements just slop together. It's a little damning that the best images in this del Toro movie involve a barren ice sheet, with nothing but an actor and a horizon. (Now, I would still respect anyone who said they were images where costume designer Kate Hawley gets to work with Goth and the other crew heads aren't getting too in her way, as she's the principal vector for poppy color and the more outlandish accoutrements. But Isaac's Victor is mostly costumed, alternately, like an alt-country singer or a 70s action pimp; and before I let this guy sculpt a lifeform I might like stronger evidence he can tie his fucking ascot.) And despite these pyrotechnics, the movie feels immensely staid in its camera direction—almost dull, really, another weird thing to say about del Toro—probably as a result of the subconscious (or fully conscious) anchor that del Toro's apparently decided Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is going to be for him.
So, yeah: Victor Frankenstein (Christian Convery as a lad), his profession laid out for him by a bully of a father (Charles Dance) before his obsession crystallizes with the death of his mother (Goth), determines to reanimate the dead, which is not what happens in Shelley's book but happens in every adaptation of it. He has achieved enormous strides by the time we catch up with his education in probably-Germany (he's still from Switzerland, presumably, though the script mentions his family's plantations, and strongly suggests they're slave plantations, so who knows); those strides, anyway, find the scientist having already unveiled to all his colleagues a composite of dead bodies that can move and respond intelligently to stimuli, a feat of such magnitude that it apparently manages to be the controversy of an entire afternoon. It does earn him the attention of one Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), an arms merchant (allowing del Toro to field a few slowballs of anti-war sentiment, that also indicate no serious awareness of the Napoleonic Wars, such as "how far apart Great Britain and most Napoleonic War battlefields are") who is also very into the possibility of building superhuman bodies, but whatever else, at least this movie isn't about the 18th century military-industrial complex weaponizing Frankensteins. (Perhaps I speak too rashly, because that would be a take.) Harlander is also set to be Victor's brother William's (Felix Kammerer's) father-in-law, as the father of Elizabeth, who is also played by Goth and so you will not be shocked to learn that Victor falls in love with her despite her betrothal to his brother and, indeed, in the gaps between her inconsistent loathing of his promethean ways, they occasionally frolic. But Victor's overriding desire is to create life from death, and he does, fashioning a Creature (Jacob Elordi). Despite what seems like a resounding success, Victor is more disappointed than enamored—the indication is that he expected his Creature to have full access to adult cognition immediately, but it's more like a child, at present able to say, only, "Victor"—and so he "cares" for it but with increasing distaste, and eventually hatred, when Elizabeth visits and she offers the Creature the sympathy he's decided belongs all to him.
This sounds better than it is, in part because I've implied there's a love triangle (or quadrangle, if we include the sibling who should be dead before he can shave) as the hand of Elizabeth is vied for by the handsome avatar of del Torian normative evil and the freakish avatar of del Torian monstrous good. (The one thing I don't have a big complaint about is the makeup used to render Elordi a slapped-together pile of blue corpsemeat—and piled high, thanks to Elordi's own naturally-freakish size—which brings us a fittingly inhuman Creature, this being Branagh's one huge miss in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; I'll say only I'm not sure if I love how much the Creature's uncanniness gets cut against when he regrows his hair, albeit probably just because I'm bald and that made me sad.) Now, I couldn't have failed to have implied a love triangle. The film does, only to do nothing with it, even though it's freighting it with what we have to suppose are the specifically Oedipal dimensions of Victor's infatuation, if, anyway, we're to take Goth's dual roles as significant. It somehow does even less with that. It more declares Victor's attachment to his mother than depicts it; I will make this my last Mary Shelley's Frankenstein comparison, but Branagh and Cheri Lunghi, in less time, managed to make real a very attached relationship that does, indeed, have a detectable incestuous twinge (not as incestuous as Branagh's Victor fucking Victor's more-or-less sister Elizabeth, but somehow the maker of Crimson Peak chickened out hard on that this time). They managed this through that old trick, acting, which isn't something we can blame Convery for not doing, and I'm not certain we can blame Isaac for not doing, because he's not really given that much of an opportunity with anything here, especially this nothing of an abortive affair, with not even enough romantic threat from the Creature to give it heft as a one-sided manifestation of Victor's megalomania.
Likewise, if my plot summary felt like a joyless recapitulation of the novel with the divergences from the novel bolted on, well, that's the experience of watching it, especially the experience of watching Isaac, whose performance is just a vehicle for Frankenstein plot points—del Toro being pointedly disinterested in the evolution of Victor's obsession, or, outside of some dreary bullshit regarding the lymphatic system (or "secret circulatory system"), the procedural details of that obsession. Honestly, this is the case for the majority of the cast: Goth, costumes aside, has even less to play, because she's just a vehicle for authorial hectoring; Waltz's evil Regency venture capitalist gets to have a big scene that he can't begin making sense out, whereupon, rather literally, he falls out of the screenplay altogether. So, vastly more obviously than it should be, del Toro's sympathies lie solely with his monster, who in a minor but curious change from the text boards the Horizont so he can harangue the captain with his tale personally. And that, for the record, has been a huge drag all along, the very frequent return to the framing device, or else a new intrusion of overclarifying voiceover narration, which feels practically designed to keep the movie from ever accruing any forward momentum.
The "Creature's" half is better. Maybe not much better, but Elordi is the only principal allowed serious and useful work, painfully groping towards comprehension and bitterly discovering that understanding is not nearly sufficient to replace a father's love. If it's a little annoying that he only calls Victor "Victor," that's not his fault, nor is the reconceptualization of the Creature as a superhero, specifically Wolverine but moreso. They make much hay out of a suicidal streak for the Creature, who cannot die, which is sensible enough; they make much hay out of action sequences for the Creature, who cannot die, which is where the movie tends to stagnate very badly (notably a dead-serious Looney Tunes dynamite gag), or fucks up in other respects—del Toro has identified the Creature as truly the new Adam, living in harmony with, for instance, deer, but unable to live in harmony with his fellow Man for they are Fallen. That's something to build on. The "forest spirit" interval, anyway, concludes with the Creature fighting CGI werewolves from some horror movie operating parallel to this one—or del Toro doesn't care how animals behave, also a possibility—and somewhere in between Elordi has (voiceover-narrated) thoughts concerning how men attack wolves, and wolves attack sheep, and sheep attack grass (I made the last one up), because of "what they are," making literal wolves eating literal sheep belonging to literal shepherds into some manner of prejudice allegory reflecting on him, and I should be clear that this is a bad screenplay on a line-by-line basis, sometimes because it's condescendingly didactic, sometimes because it plain sucks. It's egregiously bad as a narrative construct. For one thing, all those wolf corpses around the Creature's blind friend (David Bradley) should probably suggest the exigence for his presence, whereas his blind friend presumably would not have wanted him to murder his family by, for instance, tearing their jaws from their skulls, hence some emotion probably ought to be attached to it when he does. But the most jarring thing is when the Creature has tracked down Victor and related the story of how his unwitting friends taught him language when his dad didn't, while we remember that Victor had spent much fruitless effort trying to get the Creature to speak words, possibly even using the word "word," but del Toro seems not to have noticed that if you change some things in a source material, it might affect other things, and you can't always just jump right back into the source material's structure without a touch of thoughtfulness to it.
But Elordi's good enough, alone with del Toro's actual blessing, that by the last few minutes, the film has finally achieved some emotional investment for anyone other than its maker. But then, I don't think "the Creature is more interesting" is any kind of good place for a movie called Frankenstein based on a novel called Frankenstein to be; nor does come close to redeeming what's only been one awfully plodding rendition of it (so, this is a Frankenstein review, where I never even mentioned the creation sequence), for just ages already.
Score: 4/10
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