Guillermo del Toro has created a movie about a grotesquely unnatural attempt to make a human being shocking in his physical strangeness … but that’s enough about his film version of Pinocchio. Now Del Toro has written and directed a bombastic but watchable new version of Mary Shelley’s great novel and makes of it a stately melodrama, starring Oscar Isaac as the anatomist and passionate freethinker Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creature: no passé neck-bolts or big fringey forehead, of course, and if you compare him with portrayals by other actors – Boris Karloff, Peter Boyle, Robert De Niro – he is, for all the picturesque prosthetic scars, the nearest this iconic figure has come to being a bit of a hottie.
It’s an epic bromance between scientist and monster, both of whom speak with plummy British accents, the monster’s one having a touch of John Hurt in The Elephant Man. The visual style of the movie is utterly distinctive and unmistakably that of Del Toro: a series of lovely, intricate images, filigreed with infinitesimally exact cod-period detail; deep focus but also strangely depthless, like hi-tech stained glass or illustrated plates in a Victorian tome; pictures whose luxurious beauty underscores the film’s reverence for the source material and for itself, but which for me impedes the energy of horror. For all the guignol, this movie is not going to risk actual bad taste, unlike the brilliant and far more interesting film on the Frankensteinian theme: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things.
Heartsinkingly, Del Toro will insist on making his monster more of a supernatural daemon, resistant to bullets. Although I have to concede the ingenuity and verve with which Del Toro pulls off a storytelling switch to the creature’s own point of view, allowing him to narrate his own experiences after escaping Frankenstein’s lab: absurd, and yet that shift is the lightning-flash that jolts the movie into some semblance of life.
As a boy, highly strung Victor is abused by his cruel disciplinarian father (Charles Dance), a renowned physician whose choleric temper inspires Victor to surpass the old man – to rise up against his creator, in fact. As a brilliant young physician himself, Frankenstein scandalises Edinburgh’s medical establishment with his godless post-galvanic belief that a human being can be created (and death cheated) by applying an electric charge to a gruesome assemblage of scavenged body parts.
Hothead Victor is tolerated by his affectionate younger brother William (Felix Kammerer), to whose fiancee Elizabeth (Mia Goth) Victor is attracted, but who sees through Victor’s arrogance and essential coldness. It is Elizabeth’s wealthy arms manufacturer uncle Harlander (Christoph Waltz) who offers to bankroll Frankenstein’s artificial man project, which in fact is to be a single dead body salvaged from the field of battle, a gentle giant who is at first transfixed by this brave new world that Frankenstein has brought him into, but then hurt by Frankenstein’s cold impatience.
As for Waltz’s mysterious, sinister, twinkle-eyed gentleman, he says airily that in return for paying for all this, he might possibly require “a favour of some sort”. Uh, oh …
I wish that Mia Goth’s character had been given more to do here: her presence was like Mia Wasikowska’s in Del Toro’s very interesting and underrated Du Maurier-esque fantasy Crimson Peak. She has one rather excellent scene, atypical in its playful comedy, in which Frankenstein secretly follows Elizabeth to church, impishly ducks into a confession box on the priest’s side and grinningly hears her whispered confession: the sin of anger, it seems, as she resents this arrogant man Dr Victor Frankenstein who goads her in conversation … and yet she is clearly affected by him. A more comically minded film-maker might have spun that scene out a little longer: Del Toro ends it almost immediately. Goth’s contribution ventilates the drama.
Finally, inevitably, at the end of the protracted tale, we get to the question of which of the two is the “real” monster. The answer, in this high-minded and eventually rather sanctified romance, would appear to be – neither of them.
• Frankenstein screened at the Venice film festival.
