It’s been 200 years since Mary Shelley sat down and wrote Frankenstein, and yet its themes – man’s arrogance, cruelty and inhumanity to man – still feel chillingly relevant.
A story about humans overreaching and giving monstrous new life to a misunderstood, yet deadly, creature? Well, hello upcoming AI revolution. Factor in some killer costume design and excellent performances from an all-star cast, and what you have is something that still has lessons to teach us.
This take on the story is the work of Guillermo del Toro, and he wastes no time putting his own spin on things. Oscar Isaac is our Victor Frankenstein, and he’s a cold, driven surgeon who’s nursing some serious mummy issues. We see a glimpse of said mother, played by Mia Goth and dressed all in red like some harbinger of death; she dies giving birth to Victor’s brother William (Felix Kammerer) and leaves Victor with nothing but a chip on his shoulder and weird penchant for drinking milk, a la Homelander.
When he crosses paths with Herr Harlander (Christoph Waltz, sinisterness working overtime), an idea is born: with Harlander’s unlimited resources and Frankenstein’s genius, the pair aim to do what nobody has before and bring life out of death.
A war is going on, which in turn proves fertile soil for the amount of bodies that get cut up to make their new creation. This is not a film for the squeamish; there’s more viscera on display than might sit easy for casual evening viewing. The camera lingers over exposed vertebrae; over Frankenstein cutting off arms and ruinous gunshot wounds to people’s bodies. When the “it’s alive!” moment comes, there’s both shattering music and, um, the shattering of people’s bodies as they fall off high places.
Once the creature has been brought to life, Victor discovers he has bitten off more than he can chew and sets about systematically trying to rid himself of it. But of course, the monster survives, and while it’s Victor’s version of events that we hear up until that point, the second half of the film is dedicated to exploring the monster’s point of view – which has always been, and still remains here, the more compelling.
Played by Jacob Elordi (staggeringly good and barely recognisable here), this creature is a childish innocent who is gradually ruined by the ways of the world and by man’s penchant for shooting and destroying things they don’t understand. Mistreated by Victor, his only solace is Elizabeth (Mia Goth, once more), his brother’s fiancée, who treats him with gentleness.
Disappointingly, Elizabeth doesn’t have much to do beyond operate as a cipher for the men’s needs, though Goth makes hay out of the flimsy lines she has been given. At least Elordi and Goth’s scenes together (as well as later scenes involving his friendship with an old blind man) are treated delicately, though they are also smothered to death under a lilting, tender score that rather strips subtlety from the whole thing.
In fact, the whole film is lacking in subtlety, though it is gorgeous. The OTT nature of the costumes, the overblown drama, works well with the moralistic nature of the story – while Del Toro pleasingly leans away from things like jumpscares and cliched horror tropes in favour of cultivating a sense of nagging unease and tension. The monster even gets a small redemptive moment at the end, which was denied him in the book.
The only truly dud note? A quote from Byron closing the whole thing out. Shelley was a rare female author who practically birthed the entire Gothic genre; give credit where credit is due and let a woman have her day in the sun.
In cinemas from October 17; on Netflix from November 7
