Frankenstein

Rather than shocking new life into a familiar legend, respectable horror nerd Guillermo del Toro pores over Mary Shelley’s seminal science fiction masterpiece with the studious attention of a literature professor. He follows Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 example (not to mention that of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula adaptation of a couple of years earlier) in prioritising fidelity to the source material, although he takes enough liberties to keep it interesting.

Even through the homogeneously flattening filter of Netflix gloss, cinematographer Dan Laustsen spins a lattice of light sources with the expertise of a Renaissance painter. In interior scenes they describe the yellow of decaying flesh, its dominance interrupted with splashes of bloody crimson, while carving out the gloomy negative space of our darkest emotions in anticipation of the horrific story beats to come.

But the possibilities of exterior scenes are also fully explored in this persistent evocation of mood. A snow-drenched funeral foreshadows the Arctic setting of the entwined fates of Creator and Creature, and the Swiss Alps form a backdrop of bleak inspiration – God’s own works of art haunting Man’s peripheral vision, yet frustratingly out of reach.

In mimicry of the upward surge of human advancement as envisioned by the single-minded protagonist, the camera tends to start off low, crawling across the ground in primal curiosity before slowly looking up at the film’s next striking image – a magnificent ship trapped in ice; the dusty, bat-infested attic soon to become the baron’s personal charnel house.

Between the epic martial rhythms of Alexandre Desplat’s otherwise versatile score, some truly gorgeous and majestic vistas, and acts of brutal but often inconsequential violence, del Toro directs key plot points like action set pieces. As screenwriter he’s found plenty of space in Shelley’s more thoughtful but equally dynamic novel to sell his adaptation as a kind of Gothic superhero movie: the Creature is more or less bulletproof, can perform feats of impossible strength and survives sub-zero temperatures for as long as the story needs him to.

Oscar Isaac’s limitless range as an actor allows him to paint his Victor Frankenstein with colours beyond the character’s callous monochrome fixation on scientific endeavour common to other iterations. He understands and enlivens its emotional and psychological underpinnings, in a role that could so easily have been swamped by opulent production design and directorial wizardry.

Once the jaunty montage of the mutilation and repurposing of body parts (complete with Viennese waltzes and icky sound effects) is done, and the thunderstorm outside coughs up the impending chaos, Jacob Elordi captures the sensitivity of the Creature as much as the rage, charging them both with a common profound innocence.

Unlike in the novel, he and Isaac are given time to establish a relationship worth poisoning with jealousy and the foul taste of failure. Del Toro’s undying sympathy for the underdog encourages him to excise some of his unforgivably evil behaviour from the plot, and it even erupts into religious significance – the Creature’s wounds appear as both stigmata and the results of the Spear of Destiny.

Among the fine supporting cast, Charles Dance stands out as Victor’s strict, ramrod-straight father, imposing discipline as an expression of love because he’s incapable of the same human warmth his biological son later fails to imbue his own artificial son with. Christoph Waltz brings an ambiguously mercurial energy to the wealthy benefactor who has little idea of the forces he’s helping to unleash.

In the often thankless role of the only woman in an all-male environment, Mia Goth’s porcelain self-control allows the odd tantalising shudder of passion to reverberate against her exquisitely embroidered corset. Her chemistry with Isaac shimmers with playful humour, even if it lacks a certain carnality – but then Victor’s idea of ‘flesh’ is all in the mind anyway. All of their performances nod to the tongue-in-cheek theatricality of Frankenstein’s prior incarnations at Hammer Films and Universal Studios, but they remain rooted in the prevailing trend of post-Lee Strasberg authenticity.

An inveterate horror fan, del Toro has spent a lifetime greedily ingesting a century or two of the genre’s multifarious secretions. To his enormous credit, he doesn’t simply regurgitate them in this attempt at the definitive film adaptation of one of its foundational texts. Instead, he’s blended them like a chef who’s lovingly prepared each ingredient and slaved over his stove all day long.

The four-course meal he finally serves up provides exactly the expected balance of pictorial beauty, a schoolboy’s gleeful eye for grue, and a baroque mode of storytelling that proves Alfred Hitchcock’s theorem about the audience still being able to follow what’s going on even if the sound went off in the cinema.

Stylistically the film packs as big a wallop as its super-powered Creature, even if your emotional finials aren’t quite as electrified as your aesthetic ones. Still, this adaptation does at least try to map out the drama of the novel, as much as its moralistic warning against the untrammelled ambition of science.

-Stew Mott-