"It's alive!"
Well, barely. Guillermo del Toro's pointless adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is Robert Eggers' Nosferatu all over again, a sumptuous but redundant retelling of a tale told 200 times too many. The writer/director has been trying to get this film made for three decades, and anyone familiar with his career knows of del Toro's fondness for monsters. But aside from his trademark over the top violence, del Toro has brought nothing new to the table here. His Frankenstein is twice as long as James Whale's and over an hour longer than Terence Fisher's, but it lacks the depth of either of those classics.
It opens in highly promising fashion with a flash forward to Frankenstein's Monster (Jacob Elordi, an actor I touted for this role in my review of Priscilla) tracking down his creator, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, channelling The Horror of Frankenstein's Ralph Bates), in the Arctic circle. This prologue is a full-on monster movie, with the creature wreaking havoc as he attempts to board the stranded ship on which Victor has been given refuge. It might be the most well-mounted sequence of del Toro's career. It's certainly the most exciting.
Sadly, it's all downhill from there as Victor begins to narrate his life story. Del Toro has taken Shelley's tale and turned it into a cradle to grave biopic of Victor Frankenstein, and it's every bit as tedious as the average biopic. We see Victor raised as a boy by his domineering surgeon father (Charles Dance) and his doting mother (Mia Goth). Victor is scarred by the death of the latter as she gives birth to his younger brother William.
Years later we find the adult Victor embarking on his controversial goal of creating life and being shunned by the scientific community for playing God. He has one important fan however in Heinrich (Christoph Waltz), a wealthy arms manufacturer whose daughter Elizabeth (Goth in a second role) is set to marry William (Felix Kammerer). With Heinrich's financial backing, Victor builds a unique laboratory in a castle and sets about acquiring body parts.
We all know where things go from there. After several failed attempts, Victor is successful in bringing a man made from many other men to life. But the creature disappoints Victor. He is uncooperative, and a little too human for his liking. Who's the real monster etc?
Del Toro's film works best when it recognises the hammy nature of the endeavour. The performances are dialled up to 11, and Isaac is a lot of fun as one of the more repugnant screen depictions of the baron. In his early scenes, Elordi effectively sells the idea of waking in an unrecognisable body, the creature's elongated limbs reminiscent of the first time Sam Worthington adopts his Na'vi form, a baby giraffe on ice. But in his attempt to humanise the monster, del Toro goes too far. This creature is far more human than monster, which misses the point that humanity doesn't have a monopoly on all that's good.
In the film's second chapter we switch POV to that of the creature and follow him as he builds a life in a remote village, earning food by performing odd jobs as though he were Richard Kimble supporting himself while seeking the one-armed man. One romanticised shot of the creature chilling on a roof he's just thatched as the sun goes down would have you believe he's the hunky hero of a Nicholas Sparks adaptation. This creature is constantly yapping, along with providing voiceover narration, but none of his words have the impact of Boris Karloff's near silent performance. There's an awful lot of telling rather than showing here.
Frankenstein is simultaneously classy and tacky, like a European country estate that has been purchased by a classless American tech baron. The production and costume design are suitably sumptuous, and the outdoor locations are gloriously captured by cinematographer Dan Laustsen. But the interior scenes are ghastly, all the great set design undone by del Toro's trademark sickly green colour palette. Alexandre Desplat's score is incessant and intrusive. This is a film crying out for quiet moments of introspection from its two main characters, but every scene plays like it's in a rush to get to the next. The locations and production design are often undone by second rate CG, with some particularly unconvincing digital animals and weightless humans being tossed around as if they're in a Marvel movie. Indeed, this version of the creature has as much in common with The Hulk as Shelley's vision. You'll be relieved to read that there's no post-credits sequence that attempts to set up an "Avengers of classic monsters" style franchise. This is a stand alone movie, but as yet another adaptation of one of our most adapted tales, it does very little to stand alone.
Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Charles Dance
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