Guillermo del Toro has been telling monster stories for as long as he’s been making films. A romantic with keen appreciation for the macabre, his creations are things of strange beauty, haunting, poetic and unforgettable. It’s no wonder his earliest love was Frankenstein, first the Boris Karloff film, then the novel, which set him on a path to becoming a filmmaker.
Don’t expect a by-the-letter adaptation of Mary Shelley’s immortal story, however. This Frankenstein, in theaters Friday and streaming on Netflix on Nov. 7, is an interpretation, a reading of that tale of the brilliant scientist and his creation, from one of our most visionary filmmakers who has made it very much his own. Is it his best? No, but it overcomes the handicap of the dreaded passion project that has befuddled more than a few greats before him.
It is a story about stories, about fathers and sons, innocents and monsters, and the madness of creation. And while del Toro lets both Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and the creation (Jacob Elordi) tell their sides of the tale, this is not exactly neutral. Del Toro has always loved the “monster” and, perhaps because of that love, has stripped him of the complexities that made Shelley’s character so fascinating. Here, the creation is an innocent, subject to the same impulses of rage as a toddler. But, thankfully for parents everywhere, toddlers can, generally, be contained. This creature’s strength is superhuman, which is unfortunate for anyone who happens to provoke him. He doesn’t just kill — he skins, he tears jaws off, he tosses grown men with a velocity that suggests they weigh little more than a baseball. It’s all quite grisly.
But neither he nor Victor is without reason — all men are products and victims of their own fathers, whose mothers and mother figures (in both cases, Mia Goth, a metaphor that is perhaps a little too on the nose) cannot protect them, del Toro tells us, and these two are particularly doomed.
