Stream It Or Skip It?

Any opportunity to get lost in another lush Guillermo del Toro-crafted world is a good one, e.g. Frankenstein (now on Netflix), the singular filmmaker’s long-gestating dream project. And in many ways, his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s indelible 19th-century novel is a culmination of the recurring themes and aesthetics in del Toro’s most relevant work: The outsider “monster” fairy tales of Pinocchio and The Shape of Water, the horny gothic romanticism of Crimson Peak, the succulent interiors of Nightmare Alley, the gorgeous body-horror grotesquerie of Pan’s Labyrinth, and the fraught Catholicism of, well, so much of the above. Time will determine if it’s his best film – note: it’s most likely not – but it certainly reflects the passionate heart of a director who should be placed aside David Lynch and Werner Herzog in the dreamer’s hall of fame for his poetic reflection on the nature of realizing a dream: “You cannot dream about it anymore,” del Toro recently told the Hollywood Reporter. “That’s the tragedy of a filmmaker. You can dream of something, but once you’ve made it, you’ve made it.”

The Gist: We begin in 1857, the “farthermost north.” A narrative framing device: A gravely wounded Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is rescued from the rampaging Creature (Jacob Elordi) by sea captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) and his crew, whose vessel is stuck in the ice. The Creature shrugs off bullets and ragdolls a half-dozen men to death but is finally staved off with a few blasts of the blunderbuss. Victor is brought on board to regale Anderson with the tale of What The Hell Is Going On Here. He starts way back at the beginning: Young Victor (Christian Convery) was the son of a widower and cruel physician, Baron Leopold Frankenstein (Charles Dance), who punished the kid with a switch across the cheek for not properly memorizing all the minutiae of human anatomy. The Baron clearly favored Victor’s younger brother William, further fueling Victor’s desire to do exactly what every child does: rebel against his maker at the very same time conforming to it. 

And so Victor grows up to be a renowned scientist, mad around the periphery, and dashing as all hell, cutting quite a figure with a rapier hat, daggerlike sideburns and a brisk, confident, highly determined strut. Forever crushed by his mother’s passing, his determination is to poke Death in the eye socket by creating life in a laboratory. He uses electrical batteries to jolt a partial cadaver to life in front of his huffy, bejowled peers, and the powdered wigs banish him to the amoral fringe of science. He finds a benefactor in Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a wealthy arms manufacturer who has an in on some dead bodies, since his business creates them with ruthless efficiency. Harlander is the uncle of brother William’s (Felix Kammerer) fiancee, Elizabeth, played by Mia Goth, introduced to us in a shot that’ll pry your eyes wide from 1,000 meters: MIA GOTH HOLDING A SKULL. With fascination, of course. Victor is intrigued, aroused and possibly terrified and we’re right there with him, aren’t we? 

Harlander sets Victor up in an isolated castle tower, where he gets to piecing together his creation. Victor goes shopping for corpse parts at a mass public execution, but ends up on a battlefield with the gruesome product of Harlander’s wealthmaking, a moment punctuated by the line, “Look for a head that’s intact.” Victor sloshes through blood pooling on the tile of his lab, eventually raising a stitched-together man on a quasi-crucifix – oh, this irony is succulent – attached to a rod of pure silver, electrified by a raging storm. And the Creature is born, a patchwork of skin and muscle and bone, but what of its soul? All it can say is the name “Victor,” which drives Victor further into madness. He chains up the Creature with equal parts caution and cruelty. Victor didn’t foresee becoming such an impatient babysitter, nor did he foresee Elizabeth – who Victor unsuccessfully attempts to usurp from beneath his brother – becoming so enamored with the Creature. So in a fit of rage and regret, he blows up the castle and leaves the Creature to perish.

The story frequently jumps back to the frozen ship, to a Victor in physical and spiritual agony, and eventually the Creature emerges from the water to tell his story, which is essentially the film’s third act. He’s hunted; he befriends deer and mice; he hides in an old mill and does good deeds for a family who believes the “spirit of the forest” is helping them. A blind old man (David Bradley) befriends him and aids in his education and enlightenment. The Creature grows the soul of a poet. But what he seeks next stems from a confused melange of emotion and reason, so hey, congratulations on being human, my friend.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Of the dozens (hundreds?) of Frankenstein films, the last one I saw was a puerile action thing from 2014 called I, Frankenstein, which is just embarrassing for all involved parties. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is similar to del Toro’s attempt to more closely adapt the novel, but isn’t as creatively successful. Yorgos Lanthomos’ Poor Things is a delirious riff on the classic Frankenstein mythos. And Robert Eggers’ 2024 hit Nosferatu also artfully and rigorously reinterprets a classic monster tale for modern audiences.

Performance Worth Watching: (Stirs spoon in soup, takes a taste) Mm. Needs more capital-G Goth. Mr. del Toro, please cast her as the lead in Bride of Frankenstein. But more to the point: Isaac’s tortured angry soul is an exquisite counterbalance to Elordi’s tortured poet’s soul. The story works best when the Victor and Creature characters are true foils, and the two stars’ performances shake hands marvelously.

Memorable Dialogue: The Creature: “There was silence again. And then, merciless life.”

Sex and Skin: A butt or two; shapely shapes beneath see-through nightgowns.

Our Take: Del Toro’s Frankenstein is so ambitious and gloriously overstuffed it’s hard to wrap your head and arms around it. It’s bloated (two-and-a-half hours!) but never boring, sprawling but ever focused. Reducing it to its core idea is like performing an autopsy and removing its heart – you need dangerously sharp implements, your hands will get stained with blood, you’ll marvel at the gruesome beauty of the corpus humanum and reflect upon the joys of life and the pain of death and the pain of life and the joys of death. It’s evident why the corpus del Toro has been building to this; even at their most phantasmagorical (Crimson Peak, Pan’s Labyrinth) or silly (the Hellboys), his films are about what comprises the soul and what it means to be human. And that is the glorious and gory beating blood-pumping heart of the Frankenstein story.

But as elegant and bizarre and majestic and grotesque as Frankenstein can be, this isn’t del Toro’s best film. It can be both a thematic pinnacle of his career and merely above-average in its alchemical potency. The film is often airless and in dire need of the humor that enlivened The Shape of Water into something truly magical, and it doesn’t quite achieve the shattering heartbreak of Pan’s Labyrinth. (And where Frankenstein gives us a couple of erotic jolts, Poor Things generates sexual voltage that turns us to smoldering ash.) Profound as Shelley’s novel and its many subsequent cinematic interpretations were to del Toro’s vision as a filmmaker, perhaps he’s best at coalescing his influences into his own mercurial visions. 

That’s as critical as I’ll be about Frankenstein, though. It’s an engrossing, enchanting film featuring fully committed performances, sumptuous visuals and enough melodramatic gothic vibes to make you feel like you’re blanketed beneath dozens of reams of sheer black lace. It’s one of the closest adaptations to the source material yet, and the one that feels closest to its maker’s heart. Few things encapsulate del Toro’s vision like the image of Mia Goth trailing 40 inches of ginger hair and a transparent turquoise gown through a castle and into the abattoir-like catacomb where the so crushingly alone Creature – a gorgeous simulacrum of pale blue and ivory skin patches – is chained and waiting to be seen as a man and not a thing. That two-minute sequence is an evocative story in itself, and the film does this dozens of times, luring our eyes, nose, tongue, hands, heart, loins into the frame. And our minds; del Toro has synthesized a screenplay that’s a machine built of ideas: creation, identity, destruction, with love and war as the fuel.

Our Call: It’s alive – it’s alive! STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.