“Frankenstein” has been a passion project of director Guillermo del Toro’s for a long time, but you don’t need to read about how he worked for more than a decade to get it off the ground to understand that. The passion drips from every frame of del Toro’s epic reimagining of a story that has been an indelible part of cinema history since James Whale’s one-two punch of “Frankenstein” and “The Bride of Frankenstein” in the 1930s.
The Netflix film, which premiered on Saturday at the Venice Film Festival, is “Frankenstein” writ large, “Frankenstein” as a glorious spectacle in which we can see the inspiration behind del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy,” “Crimson Peak,” “The Shape of Water” and many more. It’s a filmmaker returning to his roots at a time when he has the skills to make those roots grow into something huge and singular.
Del Toro’s movie pays tribute to Whale but finds its spark in Mary Shelley’s Gothic 1918 novel “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.” As film adaptations go, this is one of the truest to Shelley’s book, which is not to say that it’s truly faithful to anything but the titanic imagination of the filmmaker who had made a career out of twisting genre and finding heart in the monstrous.
His “Frankenstein” is a titanic piece of work, two and a half hours that bend Shelley’s framework to contain nearly everything we’ve loved about this story of the brilliant but foolhardy scientist and his fearsome creation. One of the remarkable things about “Frankenstein” as we know it is how little of the familiar iconography comes from Mary Shelley, who set her tale largely in an Arctic wasteland and never once revealed what Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s creature looked like or how the doctor brought life to a being cobbled together from corpses.
Del Toro uses the book as a storytelling model but adds familiar cinematic touches like the laboratory that uses lightning to animate the creature or the lurching hulk with a monosyllabic vocabulary. But del Toro’s “Frankenstein” contains multitudes: It includes Whale’s laboratory and Shelley’s dog sled across the Arctic, and finds room for Universal Monster staples like the blind man who teaches the creature to say “friend.”
Let’s face it: Anything you loved about “Frankenstein” is probably something Guillermo del Toro loved about “Frankenstein,” and that means he likely found a place for it in this wildly enjoyable and deeply touching movie. (But not those bolts in Boris Karloff’s neck. Sorry.)
He does so using Shelley’s approach. This might be a counterintuitive decision for a filmmaker, because her novel takes an oddly distanced approach to a a raw, visceral story. It begins as a series of letters from a sea captain to his sister, in which he tells her about his trip to the Arctic, and then describes how he rescued a poor injured man, Victor Frankenstein, who’d been stranded on an ice floe. Frankenstein, he tells his sister, then related a story about his quest to create life, and how he succeeded in animating a creature assembled “from the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse.” Then the doctor reads a lengthy passage from a journal written by the creature, who’d learned to speak, read and write by watching a family through gaps in the walls of their house.
If you need a flow chart: The creature writes a narrative about his experiences, which is read by Dr. Frankenstein to the sea captain, who then puts it in a letter to his sister. It’s like a 19th century literary spin on one of those Wes Anderson movies where the story is seen through the lens of the actors who are playing it, and it saps some of the urgency out of the tale.
But del Toro recognizes the beauty in Shelley’s organizing principle, and used it in the way he separates his film into chapters: “Victor’s Story,” “The Creature’s Story.” Meanwhile, his visual imagination takes the passive and makes it dynamic. He starts with a prologue set in the Arctic, then lets Dr. Frankenstein narrate his story, then has the creature do the same, with the voiceover narration for the most part yielding to richly detailed action. The approach isn’t entirely scrupulous (the creature’s telling includes scenes he couldn’t have observed or known about), but it retains the idea of storytelling while giving the story immediacy.
As Dr. Frankenstein, Oscar Isaac veers wildly between madness and calculation, even as he tells his tale in an effete British accent. His creature, played by Jacob Elordi under a lot of makeup but none of those usual stitches or bolts, is hidden in much of the movie, then emerges not as a beast but as a tortured creation whose apparent immortality weighs on him in every moment.
Del Toro glories not only in the creature’s humanity but in every nuance and texture of this story. It goes without saying that the crafts are spectacular, and the pacing gives us time to notice them all. When a mysterious benefactor played by Christoph Waltz offers Victor Frankenstein unlimited funds to build his laboratory and continue his experiments in creating life, the director is in no hurry to jump ahead to the “it’s alive!” part of the story. Instead, he sinks into this world-building and luxuriates in it, while Alexandre Desplat’s music is stately and elegant enough that we don’t mind that it’s accompanying scenes of the doctor sawing off limbs and dissecting bodies.
The story takes liberties with previous tellings, putting the demise of Mia Goth’s feisty Elizabeth in different hands and continually pondering who the real monster might be in this tale. By the end, that’s scarcely even a question – which shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the fact that this filmmaker has always come down on the side of the outcast.
Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is a remarkable achievement that in a way hijacks the flagship story of the horror genre and turns it into a tale of forgiveness. James Whale, one suspects, would approve – and Mary Shelley, too.
“Frankenstein” opens in select theaters on Oct. 17 before streaming on Netflix on Nov. 7.
Read all of our Venice Film Festival coverage here.
