4.5 stars out of 5
Guillermo del Toro has quietly become one of my favorite filmmakers. This is his fourth consecutive movie (after The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinnochio) that I’ve rated 4.5 stars out of 5, and Pan’s Labyrinth is a classic as well. And via interviews, I’ve learned of his deep love and appreciation for Hollywood history; del Toro gets it — the magic and importance of movies.
So it was really fitting that he revisit a legendary tale of horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that has a seemingly definitive film version from 1931. But instead of remaking or (god forbid) modernizing the beloved James Whale/Boris Karloff movie, he honors it and borrows from it. Del Toro bases much more of the plot on Shelley’s novel (fine, I never read it, but I did skim the Wikipedia entry). He reworks bits that didn’t make sense, and adds his own sensibility. (Hmm, sense… sensibility… somebody should use that.) It’s almost like he’s a solo Don Henley, building the perfect beast. Or wait, no, he’s like Dr. Victor Frankenstein! Why didn’t I use that obvious comparison? Oh if only my delete key workedgkhjf.
One nifty del Toro addition is a focus on fathers and sons: young Victor and his bad dad, a dynamic which grown-up Victor unwittingly repeats with his “son,” the Monster. (But don’t call him the M-word, it’s offensive.) And, not to mention Henley twice, but, I think it’s about forgiveness.
Don’t worry, Guillermo hasn’t gone all woke with the monster (which was a Cheap Trick album?); the fable-like story actually could’ve been OK for kids but there’s a lot of blood and body parts and shooting and fire (“Fire bad!”). So if you like monster movies, you’ll like this, trust me.
Oscar Isaac, one of my fave actors, is the grown Victor Frankenstein, and he’s excellent taking the character from driven to obsessed to a God complex to madness and desperation. Rising star Jacob Elordi is The Creature and he is perfectly cast: a beautiful face that uncannily looks a bit like Karloff’s Monster. Chrisroph Waltz is a wealthy benefactor who you can probably guess is a bit nutty because it’s Christoph Waltz. And for gothic romance you gotta have Mia Goth (so good in Infinity Pool, pretty good in X, meh in Pearl, and I didn’t see MaXXXine because the person who recommended that trilogy ghosted me, harrumph!). She’s engaged to Victor’s brother (a part that del Toro doesn’t quite know what to do with) but Victor likes her, but she likes the big stitched-together dude. What a triangle!
It’s a shame that most people will watch this film at home because there are BIG settings — including the very-cool laboratory and a vast frozen expanse — that are gorgeously shot and really deserve to be seen in the theater. (Maybe you’ll be able to catch an anniversary theatrical re-release on some future Halloween.) But I must admit, it’s kind of cool that while Universal Studios has quietly, slowly rebooted Invisible Man and Wolf Man, Netflix snuck away with Universal’s Big Man and handed him off to del Toro, who delivered a great movie.
Jack Silbert, curator