Frankenstein
By Vic Lambeth
What do you think of when you hear Frankenstein? Do you see Colin Clive screaming, “It’s alive!” in glorious grains of black and white? Are you suffering flashbacks to your high school English class? Are you one of those people who still thinks Frankenstein is the name of the monster? Whatever the case may be, Guillermo Del Toro is here to set the record straight with his beautiful, HD masterpiece of a Frankenstein adaptation made for the modern-day viewer. As a predisposed fan of both the 1818 novel and the 1931 Universal picture (they are nothing alike and best enjoyed as separate entities), I have been raving about this movie long before and after it came out.
Discussing this film with anyone and everyone who will indulge me, it seems the one strength everyone can agree on is how visually striking it is. The camerawork is masterful and deliberate, and Del Toro’s color grading style remains faithful to the cool, dark palette suited to the eerie drama of his monster movies. Iconography-wise, some memorable images exist in Elizabeth’s eccentrically elaborate and colorful wardrobe choices, as random as they were, and the Frankenstein family caskets. Ornamental cast iron with an opening at the top, inviting us to gaze upon the hauntingly peaceful face of death, the caskets feed into the Gothic romance’s morbid curiosity and even maintained period-accuracy. Even more permanently branded into my mind, however, is the climax of Victor’s story, more specifically, the operating table he straps his creation to. In the requisite “It’s alive!” scene, for which we were all on the edge of our seats, the creature is vertically raised up to the crackling storm on a cross-shaped platform, crucified–condemned, ironically, to life. Victor scampers behind his work table and we hide with him, watching from a low angle as the thing is struck by lightning, to a soundtrack of unearthly organs and choir. Victor says nothing but whimpers in horror, cowering before his unholy son.
Del Toro’s film is also notable for its unwavering commitment to displaying the corporeal human body. Something I always wished for in Shelley’s novel (though it wasn’t really the point) was to see how Victor actually assembled the body, bloody guts and all. Well, Oscar Isaac rolls up his sleeves and delivers. I’ve never felt intimacy like I have watching him bonesaw a dead man’s leg off and pop a whole eyeball into its socket. While it can get a little stomach-turning, there’s something to be said for the tangibility of travelling through all of the creature’s internal organs, Magic-School-Bus-style, to watch the first beat of his heart spark from a lightning strike. If you’re squeamish, stick to the book.
With well-deserved kudos to the rest of the star-studded cast, the relationship between Isaac (as the titular doctor) and Jacob Elordi (as his creation) steals the show. When we think about Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, especially with reference to Universal’s classic depiction, we usually think about a man who stole fire from the gods and made something abominable. But in its homage to the novel’s original intentions, del Toro’s film shows us how absorbed in human knowledge Victor became, the only man with enough arrogance and sheer nerve to pour himself entirely into a project that destroys himself and everyone around him. Isaac nails that wild glint in the eyes, the anti-social, mad-scientist mannerisms that compel him to do things like digging through piles of frozen dead bodies for parts or jumping out of a bathtub stark naked to test out a theory on an adjacent operating table. He showcases Victor’s hubris-fueled deterioration in a compellingly visual way that the book never could: turning a confident, distinguished, educated man into a scared, shivering thing crawling through the Arctic, hunted and animal.
While I may not have cared for co-star Elordi’s sleek, pretty-boy makeup and laughable Rocky Horror-esque bandage-briefs, he more than makes up for it with the way he moves and speaks, dislocated and jerky as he starts to make sense of his body, like he was made of a dozen different men (and he was). Postpartum, he develops a charming, infantile curiosity about everything around him, though hindered by Victor’s cruel abrasiveness. The more time the creature spends with Victor the more he tugs on heartstrings, victimized in the way we would think about an abused child rather than a dog in a pound. The worst part is watching him grow up. When he finally escapes to the countryside, he receives an education by observing a German family from the safety of their shed. The creature watches sheep being eaten by wolves, and wolves being hunted by men, all the while narrating the scene: “The hunter did not hate the wolf. The wolf did not hate the sheep. But violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of the world. It would hunt you and kill you just for being who you are." Soon after, he finally acknowledges his socially constructed monstrosity, and it is this point of no return that is so tragically, and again ironically, human.
If you’ve ever read Frankenstein in an English class, or even read the subtitle of the book, “The Modern Prometheus,” you know that one of its main messages is that men should not play God. From here, it is just as reasonable to infer that maybe through this sacrilege that created a monster, Victor became one himself. However, the film’s incessant, conspicuous reassertion of this message is my main gripe. In the film’s final hour, for instance, William, Victor’s brother, croaks, "You are the monster." I audibly groaned. It’s as if del Toro doesn’t trust his audience to have a sliver of media literacy. It’s cheap and tacky, and it also overshadows every other possible interpretation of the story. Leave that poor dead horse alone.
The tackiness does not end there. I could ramble about a number of surface-level editing, costuming, and prop grievances, but we need to address the CGI animals. If I had spliced clips from that scene with the wolves into the 2009 Twilight sequel New Moon, no one would have batted an eye. Taylor Lautner would’ve felt right at home in Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Frankenstein. That’s terrifying.
Del Toro took plenty of creative liberties with varying degrees of success. For example, my favorite character and Victor’s best friend, Henry Clerval, was omitted completely, his role divided between Victor’s aged-up brother-turned-assistant William and a new character, Heinrich (subtle, ja?) Harlander, Elizabeth’s uncle, a wealthy arms dealer who offers to finance Victor’s whole operation under one secret condition. The switch from Victor’s humble college dorm to a massive, cliffside tower turns his project into a production, complete with funding and partners-in-crime, which detracts from the process’ original intimacy but ultimately makes it more cinematic and grandiose.
In the comments under Netflix’s first teaser for the movie in late May, someone posted a quote from Godzilla visionary, Ishirō Honda: “Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy.” One of the reasons I love Frankenstein’s story is because of my deep sympathy for the monster, who only became monstrous through other people’s prejudices. My close, personal friend Guillermo del Toro knew that, and he made this movie for me. We can complain about the movie all we want, but a huge part of its charm, for me, was the close attention and compassion it gave to each and every character, a nod to Shelley’s original intentions with a modern, bodily twist.
