Victor Frankenstein resurrects the dead only to form a complex and contentious relationship with his own creature in Frankenstein, director Guillermo del Toro‘s gorgeous new staging of Mary Shelley‘s classic novel now streaming on Netflix after a brief theatrical run stateside. Like Luc Besson‘s Dracula: A Love Tale, this adaptation takes excessive liberties to reimagine a classic horror novel as a kind of twisted romance, but del Toro’s grandiose visuals bring the story to vivid life when it matters most, making this the more successful of the two.
Frankenstein opens with a Royal Danish Navy crew led by Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) on an expedition to the North Pole, attempting to dig their massive ship out of the ice. They find a frozen and half-dead Victor (Oscar Isaac), pursued by his menacing and cloaked creation. Hopes for a faithful adaptation of Shelley’s story are high, until the Creature (Jacob Elordi) starts chucking around sailors with the unfiltered strength of a Marvel superhero.
With a terrifying and murderous monster stalking his crew from the shadows, not unlike the first season of the AMC series The Terror, Anderson sits down to listen to Victor’s entire life story. Hey, why not: that’s what happened in the book—only without the monster tossing around his men like rag dolls.
After the Arctic prologue, the following 80 minutes of Frankenstein are narrated by Victor as he recounts his life to that point. Son of frighteningly strict surgeon Leopold Frankenstein (Charles Dance), Victor is devastated by the death of his mother Claire (Mia Goth) in childbirth, and charts the course of his lifelong ambition: to resurrect the dead.
Some key changes from Shelley’s original story: Leopold dies shortly after his wife, Elizabeth (also played by Goth, in what feels a little too on-the-nose) is now William’s bride-to-be, and Victor’s key financier is a new character: Elizabeth’s uncle Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a wealthy arms dealer with a penchant for photography who bankrolls Victor’s pursuit for his own personal and undisclosed reasons.
Harlander is the most interesting character over the first half of Frankenstein, if only because he is zestfully played by the always-watchable Waltz—but his story goes nowhere, because this character has no place in Shelley’s original story. Instead, del Toro’s adaptation screams that he knows Victor is the real monster in this story, and Isaac plays him with a single note of demented focus throughout, whether for raising the dead or, newly, lusting after his brother’s betrothed. It is Victor, in fact, who is now directly responsible for the deaths of those around him.
But ah, yes, there’s a Creature around here somewhere, and 80 minutes into Frankenstein we finally get to his story—and unlike the ponderous first half of this movie, it is one of the most sumptuous versions of Shelley’s original story ever put to screen. Here, del Toro imagines Frankenstein as a kind of beautiful, ethereal-white patchwork creation who resembles the alien from Prometheus (perhaps not coincidentally, as the novel is subtitled The Modern Prometheus), and he’s richly realized by Elordi with a delicate, subtle touch that contrasts most portrayals of this character.
This is not the monster of the original story, who sets a course of murderous revenge against his creator. He is, instead, unique and beautiful in his own way, gentle and kind at heart; his brief scenes with Elizabeth and the old blind man (David Bradley) who teaches him to read and the ways of the world are especially affecting. Had del Toro focused more on the Creature and considerably less on Victor, Frankenstein would be a much more satisfying experience—but then again, the filmmaker already told that story in The Shape of Water.
Shelley’s Frankenstein is a story about the devastating effects of blind ambition, and how it consumes not only Victor, but everyone around him. After realizing his lifelong ambition, his creation takes a life of its own, and comes back to murder his father, brother, and wife—before Victor must finally confront his own mortality in the shape of his creation.
In del Toro’s Frankenstein, perhaps ironically, Victor has created something quite wonderful, but is blind to the beauty in his creation; in rejecting it, he ends up destroying everything around him by his own hand. This is ultimately a film about accepting and embracing one’s own creation, and the final scenes between Victor and the Creature are unexpectedly touching.
Whether that works as an adaptation of Shelley’s story is debatable, but there’s no denying the craft with which del Toro has brought his creation to life: sumptuous cinematography by Dan Laustsen tops his work for the director on The Shape of Water and Crimson Peak, with extensive use of wide-scope lenses demanding a theatrical presentation—it’s a shame almost all viewers will experience it on the small screen. The stunning real-world sets and locations across England, Scotland, and Canada are a marvel to look at, though questionable use of CGI (those wolves are a real distraction) briefly dampens the visuals.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein takes more liberties with Shelley’s story than Kenneth Branagh‘s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the 2004 miniseries with Luke Goss and Alec Newman, which remains the most faithful adaptation—but it’s a masterfully put-together patchwork about obsession and love for one’s own creation. For all its narrative excesses, it’s a hauntingly beautiful work that reanimates Shelley’s timeless themes with more tenderness than terror. Like its creature, the film may not be perfect—but it has its own unique beauty.
