Film review of the horror based on Mary Shelley’s famous novel directed by Guillermo del Toro about an scientist who creates a man from dead bodies. Starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi.

Synopsis

(Adapted from IMDb.com): Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), a brilliant but egotistical scientist, brings a creature (Jacob Elordi) to life in a monstrous experiment. Upset that his creation does not live up to Victor’s expectation of perfection, he abandons him and then destroys the laboratory that birthed him.

The creature spends many months in the wilderness learning about his existence, literature and the love and cruelty of humans.

The scene is set for tragedy as the enraged creature stalks Victor and his loved ones.

Review, by @Reelreviewer

Victor, you only listen when I hurt you.

Guillermo del Toro’s aesthetically awesome and technologically terrific take on the classic scientific exploration vs ethics and morality theme is a feast for the eyes and ears. It is also up for nine Oscars at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday 15 March.

Shelley’s book has been adapted to death for more than 200 years; the first stage adaptation (itself the basis for early film versions, of which I have seen a few) came out in 1823, just five years after the novel.

With this cinematic and televisual legacy looming large over any new adaptations (astonishingly, there could be as many as 469 feature films, 236 short films, 93 TV series, and 394 TV episodes based on the great tome), it’s to del Toro’s credit that he not only felt up to having a go, he’s able to make an entertaining, gripping movie that stand on its own against its forbears.

Its USP is absolutely the smart and sumptuous production design, costuming (both drip with meaning and symbolism) and, of course, the hair and make-up.

In a featurette accompanying the movie, del Toro and his team detail the ‘old school’ Hollywood craftsmanship that went into the production. I’ll start with Horizon, a full-size replica of a 19th-century sailing ship.

Rather than using CGI, the ship has a tangible physical presence. You can hear its timbers groan and can imagine the smells onboard. It gives the actors something to interact with, to touch and enhance their performances, rather than moving around empty green screen space. It also lends the movie some real epic stature.

There are moments where the film is shot to resemble old master paintings, giving gorgeous visuals and slowing the film to a dreamlike pace. When we first see Elizabeth (Mia Goth), del Toro’s camera slowly approaches her from behind. It’s stalkerish; fittingly, as we see her through Victor’s eyes (the camera) as he lusts over his future sister-in-law.

Creepy, Hitchcockian even, but then Victor is a creep throughout most of the film. Confident to the point of cockiness, he is blind to the terrible damage his ambitiousness will create; as viewers, of course, even if not familiar with the tale, we can see exactly what will transpire.

Victor is a gift for actors to show off as the infamous mad scientist, and Oscar Isaac is a bold choice to play him. His career in film (debut: 1998) has been garlanded with international acclaim and awards for great performances in sometimes unsympathetic parts (I loved him in Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013), but I think he’s off-key as Victor.

Maybe its the accent, maybe he tips over ‘barmy doctor mode’ and into something a tad too bizarrely melodramatic (to note, I feel Colin Clive does this in the 1931 and 1935 Universal films and he gets a bit too much), maybe it’s because the Creature is played so touchingly by Jacob Elordi that I sympathise with that character too much to care about his ‘dotty daddy’.

Victor’s impatience and rejection of his non-perfect creature – a 7ft baby who needs to learn how to breathe, stretch, move, think and talk – is repaid with much fury and vengeance, but Elordi’s characterisation is as soulful as it is terrifying.

This is even more remarkable as he spends the first section of the movie lumbering around half-naked except for a pair of surgical boxers. ‘After birth’, he bathes in the sunlight, mimicking his father, something that will help him in later scenes and the only worthwhile thing his father teaches him.

It’s a performance that reaches for your heart, and Elordi is up for a deserved Best Actor statuette at the Academy Awards.

We also have two crazy scientists in this movie. Aside from the medical Victor, there is his Mercury-dependent, syphilitic benefactor Heinrich (Christoph Waltz). Heinrich bankrolls Victor’s unholy experiments and helps him select the choicest cuts of dead soldier flesh from the snowy wastes of a nearby war.

Heinrich is an arms millionaire, so there is a wicked circularity here as he hoovers up what he’s helped destroy only to recycle the parts to give himself new life in the Creature’s body.

Heinrich is even prepared to sell his niece, Elizabeth, to Victor when he sees his interest in her. Ever the financial whizz, the transaction can easily be transferred from bro to bro.

Goth nabs one of the more intriguingly developed roles. In the novel, Elizabeth is the moral conscience, but relatively passive, just another figure Victor neglects into the arms of his enraged and murderous ‘son’.

In Del Toro’s film, Elizabeth develops a bond with the Creature, possibly a burgeoning romance, attracted to his innocence and hulking strangeness. Goth’s scenes with Elordi are brief but jarring and intense, the most dramatic and psychologically impressive in the film.

Goth (who also plays Victor’s doomed mother Claire in the opening scenes) is also treated to the most gorgeous costumes in the film, couture that carries on the themes of nature and science that run throughout the production design.

When we first see Elizabeth, she is almost static, like tableaux, in front of a classic painting. Fingering a skull, Victor is immediately and obviously drawn to her, like a moth to a flame.

The ridiculously voluminous veils Elizabeth wears resemble the fluorescent butterfly nets she and Victor use during leisurely lepidoptery in the garden. Her other dresses feature green spines that ape the Creature’s purloined coat, human cells and beetle bodies.

The arm ‘bandages’ of her wedding dress offer a link to James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935); Elsa Lanchester’s Bride wears something similar.

Del Toro’s movie lacks Whale’s humour, but matches him with heart and spectacle. As his Frankenstein comes to the end of its initial release, another is preparing to start. Jessie Buckley will play The Bride!, actor Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second stint in the director’s chair for a feature-length film. The trailer looks incredible, but it will be interesting to see how this strikingly different version will fare with audiences and critics.

See the official Netflix trailer.

Cast & credits

Director: Guillermo del Toro. 2hrs 29mins/149 min. Double Dare You (DDY)/Demilo Films/Bluegrass Films/Netflix. (15).

Producers: J. Miles Dale, Guillermo del Toro, Scott Stuber.
Writer: Guillermo del Toro.
Camera: Alexandre Desplat.
Music: Dan Laustsen.
Sets: Tamara Deverell.

Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Charles Dance, David Bradley, Lars Mikkelsen.