It doesn’t take a film critic to see aspects of Mary Shelley’s horror classic Frankenstein bountifully sprinkled throughout Guillermo del Toro’s career—from misunderstood creatures (The Shape of Water), to gothy abodes (Crimson Peak), to body horror (Pan’s Labyrinth). So it’s unsurprising that Del Toro has made a gorgeously realized adaptation that shelves perfectly alongside his previous work. Whether this is the ultimate adaptation of Shelley’s 1818 tale will, I’m sure, be up for debate.
Returning to its literal roots, del Toro’s version opens on the Arctic ice, the time period bumped ahead to the 1850s, where an explorer’s ship, wedged among the floes, happens upon a man and a monster. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), bloodied and beaten, warns of the beastly sounds in the distance that bring more than a literal chill to the air. The monster (Jacob Elordi), a cobbled-together man of superhuman strength, is pursuing Victor. Brought on board for protection, Victor begins to tell his story to the frightened captain.
Flashing back, Isaac plays Victor as a handsome yet sweatily unstable dandy: scarf around his neck, jaunty fedora, and long curly dark hair. He has more than a little air of madness around him… he’s a scientist out to solve the ultimate riddle of life: how to cheat death. You can sense del Toro’s glee in the staging of some of the early scenes, including one where Victor uses a couple batteries to cause a human torso to groan to life in front of his shocked medical peers. There’s a lot of fun (and graphic squelchiness) during this brisk and ickily watchable first part of the film.
Victor’s kind of hot, honestly, and shares sparks with his brother’s fiancée, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), whose own morbid curiosities mean she’s not easily spooked by Victor’s questionable experiments. With the help of a benefactor with ulterior motives (played by Christoph Waltz), Victor gets access to everything he needs (including fresh bodies from a battlefield) to bring to life, so to speak, the ultimate experiment. By the time he’s finished sawing, sewing, and stapling together a man from corpse parts, his trusted inner circle is all-in to see if he can pull it off. We all know what happens next.
The second half of the film shifts to the monster’s perspective. My first thought upon seeing “the creature” (as he’s credited) was that del Toro certainly has a type. Jacob Elordi feels like a younger, fresher version of del Toro’s favorite collaborator Doug Jones: extremely tall and lithe, with an elegant suppleness to his movements. Shackled by Victor in the castle’s bowels, the creature is sympathetic and even sweet, especially given the abuse he endures from his master. When Elizabeth encounters the preternaturally strong creature, she finds a kindred spirit rather than something to fear.
Whether it’s a flaw of the original story or of del Toro’s interpretation, Frankenstein feels a bit top-heavy, like two different films in one. The first half, Victor’s story, is breathlessly paced, creepy, and even funny at times. The second, from the creature’s point of view, slows things down as he hides on a farm, befriends a blind man, learns to speak, and, somehow, is able to read Paradise Lost after what seems like only a season of tutoring. (Superhuman brain, too, I guess?) The timeline gets a bit squishy as the monster tracks Victor across the land, yearning for a companion but quick to wreak havoc when denied.
While del Toro’s Frankenstein stumbles in pacing and cohesiveness during its latter half, he more than compensates with the film’s look and feel. The sets, costumes, and effects are, unsurprisingly, outstanding (for example, Frankenstein’s castle is almost laughably over-the-top in its gothic splendor). Oscar Isaac has a field day as the egotistical, narcissistic Victor, while Elordi delivers a lovely, nuanced performance as a “monster” who’s sympathetic, sensitive, and, well… kind of hot (unexpected!). There have been countless versions of Frankenstein over the years, and while this one may not be a great film, it’s certainly the best-looking of the bunch—and worth watching for that alone.
