Throughout his career, Guillermo del Toro has made a history of proving that it is the monster who is good and it is men who are evil. Here he returns with Frankenstein – perhaps what he was building towards his entire career – the ultimate example of this narrative. All the heart and soul is poured into this gothic epic; lavish and ultimately spellbinding. We open on a boat stranded in the ice in the far north; a wounded man and a mysterious figure that cannot be cowed by guns or any mortal weapon. The man – Doctor Victor Frankenstein – has a story to tell – of the monster he created and enslaved and the power that drove him made.
This is the film that pours all the same and guilt into Frankenstein’s creation – we watch as he sees himself corrupted in the idea of cheating death. The loneliness of man and his desire for more; a connection – del Toro plays with the fundamentals of what would inspire such a man to go to such lengths that he did – it shows Victor’s doomed ambition; the death of his mother at a young age and an uncaring father who spends more time interested in his brother, William. The creature design and set production is of course fantastic but this is as much a performance piece as any; Oscar Isaac pours his heart and soul into Victor’s performance and is able to really capture the character’s greed and desire. Isaac rivals Mia Goth and Jacob Elordi makes a mark as the unsettling creature molded by fate more than circumstance.
Mia Goth and David Bradley stand out as terrific characters – Goth as a doomed bride of William, Elizabeth, who is caught in the battle between both Frankenstein brothers and the monster’s creation. It’s done with care and precision even in the Netflix del Toro era which is saying a lot – Elordi feels on paper like the typical Netflix stunt casting but his performance as the monster is fantastic – the sequence after he escapes Victor’s gothic, lavish tower of nightmares to find a home in the woods looking after a blind David Bradley is heartbreaking and a real mediation on the circumstances that you are created in making the monster: he is immediately treated as the other; different and hunted. But yet he wants to belong – he wants to learn – and only the blind accept him for who he is because they cannot see what Frankenstein made him.
The gothic opening on the ice and the captain driven by pursuit of a quest that will kill his men reminds Frankenstein of himself – the two share a kindred spirit. Del Toro uses his framing device of the Doctor; and then the monster; both telling their stories to the Captain. It’s great getting both perspectives: you can see the point where the film switches its attention from being sympathetic to Frankenstein and you turn against him with the audience – it comes long before the spectacular birthing of the monster; a real ode to the labyrinthical brilliance of production values that Del Toro creates at every turn. It’s stunning – the lightning strike; the moment of madness – the horror and the beauty that follows – up there with his magnum opus – everything that he was building towards over his career as a filmmaker. Can you imagine a world where Del Toro didn’t direct a Universal Monsters film at some point in his career? It would feel odd – almost alien. It feels like the next progression from the director behind The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley; a culmination of his entire output up to this date.
His Netflix output feels like Del Toro pushing at the horizons and making his own mythmaking stamp on the already laid-down world. Like Pinocchio it’s distinctively his own take – it could come from no other filmmaker. Isaac is manipulatively brilliant, Elordi the victim of his own world; Mia Goth the film’s beating heart. I love the brief role that David Bradley has here – everybody coming together to film a masterpiece that shouldn’t feel redundant because it’s on Netflix rather Netflix itself should be redundant for a film like this: it plays at its best on the big screen in a crowd. Imagine watching this at home on a small screen – it couldn’t possibly be me. The experience is radically different.