Producers: Guillermo del Toro, J. Miles Dale and Scott Stuber Director: Guillermo del Toro Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Charles Dance, Ralph Ineson and Christian Convery Distributor: Netflix
Grade: B+
Whatever criticisms might be made of Netflix, it deserves plaudits for making it possible for visionary writer-director Guillermo del Toro to make versions of two classics that have obsessed him since his childhood—first the remarkable animated “Pinocchio” of 2022, and now this epic live-action take on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. It’s no more a literally faithful rendering than any other of the myriad films based on the book, but though it moves very slowly every frame carries the magic and majesty of del Toro’s personal stamp and his empathy with the outcast.
Shelley’s plot is moved forward to England in the mid-1850s and told in the form of a prologue and two chapters, the first related by Victor Frankenstein and the second by his creature. In the introduction, set in 1857, the captain (Lars Mikkelsen) of a ship stranded in the Arctic ice while trying to reach the North Pole rescues Victor (Oscar Isaac), whose solitary expedition has ended in disaster. As Victor recovers and the creature (Jacob Elordi), a huge, cloaked figure in the distance, demands that he be turned over to him, Frankenstein tells his tale.
He begins with his childhood, an unhappy one in which he (played by Christian Convery) was dominated by his stern father Baron Leopold (Charles Dance), the country’s most eminent surgeon who planned for the boy to follow in his medical footsteps and tutored him mercilessly. His sole solace was the love of his mother Claire (Mia Goth); she died giving birth to Victor’s younger brother William (Rafe Harwood), who became Leopold’s pride and joy. When Leopold died, Victor left to pursue his goal of surpassing his father by conquering death, rebuking the older man who said it couldn’t be done. Thus began the experiments that shocked the medical establishment of the day with their attempts to revivify dead flesh through electrical power.
But one man is enthralled by Victor’s radical ideas—Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a wealthy arms dealer who’s the uncle of Lady Elizabeth (also played by Goth), the fiancée of the bland William (now played by Felix Kammerer). Victor is attracted by Elizabeth’s intelligence, though her opinion of his arrogant manner is decidedly negative. Heinrich has both professional and personal reasons for bankrolling Victor’s work, which won’t be revealed until later in the tale, but he installs the driven doctor in an abandoned water tower on the Scottish coast (“Aqua est vita” reads a sign above the entrance), assists him in procuring body parts from among executed criminals through bribery of the chief executioner (Burn Gorman) and the battlefield victims of the Crimean War. Along with William, Harlander also aids him in the construction of the elaborate mechanism that will vivify the creature using lightning during a ferocious storm, but Victor’s discovery of Harlander’s motives leads to a fight in which the older man perishes.
Initially Victor’s education of the newborn (played by Elordi swathed in bandages) is promising, but the creature seems unable to enunciate anything but his maker’s name. Victor grows impatient with the progress, and after Elizabeth visits and is both attracted and repelled by the creature she stumbles upon, decides to destroy it. He sets fire to the tower and believes the creature to have been done away with in the ensuing explosion, which injures him so severely that his leg must be amputated and replaced with a prosthesis.
But the creature has survived by escaping down a chute into the sea and, in the second chapter of the film, after rampaging onto the stranded boat with his superhuman strength and amazing regenerative powers, relates his wanderings to Captain Anderson and Frankenstein. His wanderings took him into the forest, where an encounter with an obviously CGI deer possesses a “Bambi”-like quality, emphasizing the emotional connection he makes with the animal before it’s shot by a band of hunters who also target him.
He follows the hunters back to their camp, where his anger is dispelled and he chooses to become their secret benefactor as he observes the elderly blind grandfather (David Bradley) instructing his granddaughter (Sofia Galasso) and hides in the annex, where he lives with some cute CGI mice. When the rest of the hunters leave for the season and the old man stays behind alone, the creature reveals himself and becomes his companion, being taught by the old man from his collection of books, which pointedly includes Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
This peaceful interlude ends when a horde of wolves attack the camp and kill the old man; the creature is blamed by the returning hunters for the carnage, and they again attempt to kill him. But by now it’s clear that he cannot die, and he returns to the ruins of the tower, where he finds Victor’s journals and learns how he came to be. Feeling betrayed, he vengefully tracks down Victor at his brother’s wedding. In the ensuing confrontation, in which Victor refuses to consider creating a similarly death-defying companion for him, Elizabeth and William are both fatally wounded, and Victor begins his pursuit of his creation.
This returns the story to the icebound ship and the reconciliation of Victor and his creature before Victor dies. After using his strength to free the vessel from the ice, the creature is left alone in his eternal solitude. Captain Anderson has learned the lesson of the story and decides to head back home rather than continuing his own obsessive mission.
Del Toro embellishes this version of Shelley’s tale with staggering attention to visual detail; production designer Tamara Deverell and costumer Kate Hawley show themselves utterly devoted to the director’s endlessly extravagant and imaginative approach, as does visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi, whose efforts dovetail with his preference for practical effects insofar as possible. So does editor Evan Schiff, who links the lustrous, sometimes ghoulish, images fashioned by del Toro and cinematographer Dan Lausten together at a pace that some will find as glacial as the ice in the prologue, though in fact the deliberation feels magisterial rather than turgid. Alexandre Desplat’s score adds to them a lushly epic quality befitting del Toro’s ambition.
The performances exhibit starkly contrasting tones. Isaac’s is the personification of Gothic ardor, both scientific and romantic; it’s a defiantly theatrical turn depicting a man so obsessed with a goal that he’s heedless of the possible consequences. By contrast Elordi is soulfully poignant in his early scenes, moving with balletic grace that morphs into inexorable force as he comes to hate his creator and, in fact, himself; the actor is aided greatly by the exquisite creature design overseen by del Toro and executed by Mike Hill. The double casting of Goth, whose very name points to the character of both book and film, accentuates the drive behind Victor’s mania—his love of his mother. Dance, on the other hand, contributes his patented attitude of disdain to Leopold Frankenstein, and Waltz his equally familiar sinister haughtiness to Harlander.
It’s unfortunate that most viewers will watch “Frankenstein” at home on screens of various sizes but all of them inadequate to fully capture the sumptuousness of del Toro’s achievement, which deserves to be seen on the largest possible screen with the finest sound system–an opportunity you’re being given during an all too short window before it appears on Netflix. It may not be the definitive cinematic telling of Shelley’s tale of man’s misguided desire to play God—no one should be ready to do without James Whale and Boris Karloff, and there’s merit in some of the other films based on it as well. But it’s an inspired remolding of a classic book, one boasting a unique grandeur.