The king of creature features, Guillermo del Toro resurrects Mary Shelley’s literary creation in all its full-on gaudy gothic glory. Oscar Isaac is Baron Victor Frankenstein, who is rescued from a monster on the ice by the crew of a ship of polar explorers. He is a man with a tale to tell of how he got there: but, like Dewey Cox in Walk Hard, he has to start at the very beginning: with a childhood of a bad daddy (Charles Dance) and grief that drives an ambition to conquer death itself.
From anatomy theatres to graveyards, Victor proceeds, a floppy-haired Byronic hero aided not by Igor but Christoph Waltz’s Herr Harlander, an arms dealer who is willing to fund Victor’s scientific research for his own ends.
Isaac is superb as Victor, as much an artist as a scientist; his gruesome work accompanied by Alexander Desplat's joyful waltz as he peels skin and gets elbow deep in viscera. A pile of body parts supplied by the butchery of the Napoleonic wars and some large jars of coloured fluid combine with the blasts of a passing lightning storm to create Jacob Elordi’s monster.
Meanwhile, his younger brother William (Felix Kammerer) is about to marry Elizabeth (the nominatively determined Mia Goth), Harlander’s niece, who Victor soon has feelings for. It is, as they say, complicated.
It’s as much Mills & Boon as Mary Shelley
For years, del Toro has built his myths in films like Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak with the dusty and elaborate furniture of the gothic. His baroque vision fuses personal and societal dysfunction with myths of otherness. Here, given the opportunity to bring his childhood favourite to life, Del Toro throws everything he can at the screen. Frankenstein is loud, bombastic, sublime and silly. This is a universe in which towers totter above precipices, cellars drip hollowly and women wear impossible dresses in the snow.
It’s as much Mills & Boon as Mary Shelley. Although there are wisps of romance, they’re soon blown away in the sturm und drang as the Creature takes over the second half of the narrative and finally gives his point of view. Elordi plays the new creation like a yearning, oversized teenager with good reason to feel mixed up in his stitched-together skin (he is, after all, made of several different people).
Some might feel that in being given rejuvenating superpowers of healing, the Monster is more Wolverine than Boris Karloff, but this is not your grandparents’ Frankenstein (your parents got Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein and we don’t talk about it). As with The Shape of Water, del Toro makes no secret of where his sympathy lies and who the real monsters are, but there are surprises here. Not least of which is how moved you might feel in the end.
Frankenstein premiered at the Venice Film Festival.