GODS AND MONSTERS

 Del Toro's Frankenstein electrifies

 

It's easy to see why filmmaker Guillermo del Toro calls Frankenstein his dream project. Of course, the auteur behind Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water would have a special affinity for Mary Shelley’s seminal horror story, which Del Toro brings to the screen with all the lavish, soulful grotesquerie for which he is so renowned. No matter how many of the previous 2.8 billion adaptations you’ve seen, Del Toro retells the tale with electrifying urgency, and haunting pathos.

 

Of all the other version out there, Del Toro's sticks closer than most to the tone and narrative of Shelley's novel. It begins and ends in the frozen waste of the North Pole, to which Creator and Creature have hunted each other. There is no Igor in Frankenstein's lab. And the Creature cobbled together from spare body parts is not reduced to monosyllabic grunts; he learns to articulate his rage and despair.

 

 Oscar Isaacs plays Victor Frankenstein with imperious intellect and frenzied zeal. Del Toro likes to shoot his close-ups at weird angles — chin jutting out, eyes wild, mop of black curls streaming behind — to illustrate the idea of scientific questing run amok. Jacob Elordi is absolutely terrific as the Creature, jolted to unnatural life in a lightning storm, through no fault of his own, then abandoned to work out the complexities of existence by himself.

 

In these early scenes, he beautifully expresses the absorbing curiosity, the awed sense of wonder, and capacity for sudden delight, of an infant. (Despite the fact that Elordi must be about eight feet tall, which makes his performance even more affecting.)

 

But like so many thoughtless new parents, Frankenstein has no idea what to do with his newborn. The act of creation itself was the exciting part, not dealing with the consequences. His initial delight soon turns to irritation with the Creature he keeps chained up, unclothed, below stairs. He neglects to teach him language (the only word the Creature knows is "Victor"), then berates him for his inability to communicate. Soon enough, the runaway Creature learns language and decency from a kindly old blind man who befriends him. But it ends badly, of course, when the old man's family returns.

 

Indeed, while a fugitive in the world, a stolen cloak concealing his stitched-together face, the Creature establishes cooperation and fraternity with the wildlife he encounters, like a foraging deer, and the rat colonies with whom he shares his hiding places. It's only through his encounters with humans that he learns cruelty and violence.

 

(Trigger warning: a couple of scenes of animal death are integral to the plot, but not for the tender-hearted.)

 

Shelley's novel is subtitled The Modern Prometheus, and this is how Victor sees himself, stealing the gift of life from the gods, mostly to prove himself their equal. When he brings an early working prototype — head, torso, arms — to display at a medical college, the doctors and students watch in horrified fascination as he temporarily reanimates the thing with an electrical charge. Tellingly, when Victor abruptly switches off the life force, he takes no notice of the creature's pitiful death rattle.

 

These questions of Creator and Creature, father and son, and humanity and its opposite, are explored as their paths continue to cross, leading eventually to their last, fateful encounter in the frozen north. Early on, while still imprisoned under the lab, the Creature meets, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), fiancée to Victor's brother. Far from horrified, she sees them as kindred spirits, their undervalued wit and worth buried beneath their facades — in her case, her porcelain beauty, which guarantees she will never be taken seriously in the world of men. 

 

Later, the Creature confronts Victor with the demand that he build him a mate, like himself, with the eloquent declaration, "I cannot die. And I cannot live alone." The Creature's immortality is not found in Shelley's book, it's completely Del Toro's invention. And while I confess, I must have missed the movie's scientific explanation for why this is so, it enhances the tragedy of the Creature's solitary and eternal otherness.

 

 Meanwhile, these tantalizing themes play out within the extraordinary, immersive production design by Tamara Deverell. A circle of life motif recurs in a giant stone bas-relief rondel that looks like a Greek tragedy mask with Medusa curls, overlooking the lab, an enormous round, mullioned window, and a huge, circular bronze drain in the middle of the floor. Amid the steampunk assortment of pots, beakers, winches, pulleys, and cogs in the lab, the patchwork figure is hoisted up on a cross like the Vitruvian Man, awaiting the spark of life.

 

Frankenstein runs for a whopping two hours and forty minutes, and there's never a dull moment, in terms of things to look at, thoughts to ponder, and sheer, cinematic bravura. And it never runs out of steam, right up to the last, enormously moving confrontation between Victor and his creation, and the gorgeous and devastating final frame.

 

(This movie deserves to be seen on the big screen, of course, but if you do watch it on Netflix, you have the option of hitting pause to drink in all the details!)