‘Frankenstein’ Review: To the Victor Go the Spoils [B] Telluride
For close to one hundred years, Frankenstein has always been a complex, fascinating tale of the moral consequences from man’s decision to create something beyond their control; new life after death. Filmmakers from around the world have been taking the sacred words of Mary Shelley and adapting them into gothic, horror tragedies that have shocked, terrified, and even made us laugh out loud, (Young Frankenstein) audiences for generations. It can become a daunting task to want to set out and make another version of this beloved classic story, which is why for the last twenty-five years, Academy Award-winning writer-director Guillermo del Toro has been mulling over his chance to create a version of Frankenstein that would not only be definitive to his unique style and visionary imagination, but satisfy the dream of an artist who’s wanted to make this passion project come a reality for his entire career. Coming off his magnificent, beautiful adaptation of Pinocchio, he decided time it was time, and in making his Frankenstein, del Toro has made an epic film that is the culmination of the themes he’s been tackling throughout his career, being loyal to the original source material while adding his own flair that makes him one of the best directors working today.
We start our journey through del Toro’s fantasia in the future, in the middle of the arctic, with Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) and his Danish crew as they are traveling to the icy north on an expedition, which is about to end if they can get their boat out of the ice. Late one evening, as the men are trying to stay warm through the harsh conditions, they see a flickering light in the distance; a fire burning with a collection of supplies and sled dogs barking their heads off. Anderson and his men discover Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) beaten up, left for dead in the darkness of night with his blood dripping on his body. He’s taken into the ship (one of the various pieces of incredibly detailed production design built from scratch by Tamara Deverell and her team for the film) for questions of how he got to be in such a dangerous position, but as he is about to answer, a loud rumble is heard in the distance and out of the darkness, a larger, dangerous, angry figure emerges and unleashes a violent rampage on Anderson’s men, the type of brutal kills that could be found in del Toro’s earlier work like Blade II.
The Creature wants his master, the man who created him, the father figure that discarded him years before and left him for dead; now wanting to return the favor. After Anderson is able to get the vengeful beast to exit the boat, and as Victor’s Creature (Jacob Elordi) stalks the sea vessel from a far, counting the minutes till his next attack, a weak, one legged Victor tells his story of how he ended up in the company of the Captain and his men, and with this, del Toro sets up a story structure that we’ve yet to see in this tale, as we hear Victor’s accounts how he created the monster and lost everything he loved, and later, in a second part, the Creature gets to explain his side of the story. In an almost Rashomon-style of perceptive storytelling, del Toro hooks the audience in from the get-go, promising a deeper look into the doctor and his creation than we ever had before. It’s a perfect opening prologue; it’s just a shame that the following chapters told by Victor and the Creature are not as compelling.
With Victor narrating, we travel back in time to his childhood, where a small child was groomed into becoming his father’s (a rather menacing Charles Dance) successor in the field of medicine. A sweet boy at his core who loved his mother (Mia Goth, in one of her brief, forgettable roles), only for her to be taken away by his father when he couldn’t save her as she was in labor with Victor’s brother William (portrayed in the film primarily by Felix Kammerer), and use her death as a launching point to avenge this loss by becoming the leading medical mind, and coming up with a way to cheat death by reanimating the dead. This sequence of events is brief but emotionally impactful to the man Victor will become, with del Toro once again tapping into broken family dynamics to dive forward his main character’s motivation much like his Hellboy films, Pan’s Labyrinth, or Pinocchio. As the maestro flashes us forward to modern times, Victor is under interrogation by the scholars and professors who think that his unconventional methods of researching reincarnation are dangerous. In giving a minor demonstration of where his hypotheses have taken him so far, Isaac commands the screen, delivering a portrayal of a manic man desperately turning his adventurous ideas into a fatal reality. From spouting scientific dialogue throughout the runtime of the film to the physical performance he puts on in creating and fighting the Creature, Isaac is excellent in every moment he is on screen (even if his English accent does come off a little strong at times, a minor complaint).
When cast out by the scientific community, he is given a second chance to fund his dream project by a successful business man named Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) who shares Victor’s interest in uncovering the secrets to immortality. He gives him unlimited resources, and alongside the help of his brother William and several of Harlander’s men, they find a location suitable enough to conduct these questionable experiments and bring forth a new age of man. As Victor gets closer to uncovering how to send the electric current to the right part of the body in order to achieve his vision, Harlander’s tentacles become tighter, as is the case when one is given a vast sum of money in order to grant someone’s lifelong dream. Intentional or not, it is rather curious how this part of Victor’s story mirrors how del Toro struggled for years to get this project off the ground, not just from his own personal reservations about making the film but also how much his version of Frankenstein would cost given his usual stunning attention to every detail found within his films. If the director wanted to focus more on that, it would’ve been a massive modern wrinkle to add to this story as individuals or corporations with vast sums of money can buy everything up or conjure whatever expensive idea up in the face of a troublesome time for cinema. At the end of the day though, all that matters to Victor and del Toro is the creation of his creature/feature and that’s exactly what happens to rather bombastic, thrilling effect with the electrical currents flowing into a beast created out of the dead body parts of soldiers lost in a battle.
At the same time Victor is working on the Creature, he becomes distracted by the inquisitive mind of Elizabeth Lavenza (Goth), William’s fiancée and Harlander’s niece, who questions his methods and conclusions as to the world of science. As time goes, and the lab is being built in the castle for Victor with William watching the contraction of this elaborate location, Victor and Elizabeth come close, but never becomes physical or too romantic because of Victor need to finish his work before the funding runs out, Elizabeth’s commitment to William, and the fact that she can see how obsessive and dangerous Victor might become if he reaches his endgame. Goth, a good actress when given the right material (her performance in Pearl is some of the best work within a horror film this decade), is short-changed in this film, and Elizabeth’s contribution to this film becomes only to serve the connection between the two men that are after her and the compassion she shows for the Creature later in the film. If the film took less time setting up so many aspects of the main sections of the story then maybe she would’ve had more to do but otherwise, it’s pretty disappointing on both the page and screen for a character that has all the promise to be just as interesting as Victor or the Creature.
Once Victor has created his monster, and starts to experiment on him, we are introduced to the origins of the violent beast we saw at the prologue. With his purpose to be a fully intelligent being from the time he is reanimated, the Creature doesn’t meet the standards that Victor sets out for him, to which the genius doctor starts to abuse the Creature, realizing his work has been all for nothing, and burns down the castle in a fit of rage and frustration. With only being able to say one word, “Victor,” (take a shot every time he says it) the name of his creator and father, the Creature screams for him as he is being surrounded by fire. As he breaks the chains he is tied up in, he escapes to a local farmhouse, where he is taken care of by an old blind man (David Bradley, in a rather silly performance that reminds of the late Gene Hackman in Young Frankenstein) who shows him compassion and teaches him how to read and learn with the patience that Victor didn’t possess, thinking the creature is a spiritual being known as “the spirit of the North” (take two shots every time he says this in this sequence). At the same time, he is hunted by the local villagers and a pack of (badly rendered) CGI wolves, which turn the innocent being into the monster that seeks revenge and a companion from Victor. Elordi, one of our promising young actors working today, delivered a complicated performance as the monster, expertly displaying the childlike nature upon his birth to the commanding, towering presence he has when he is in front of Captain Anderson and Victor explaining his side of the story. Equal parts touching and terrifying, Elordi sticks the landing on bringing a worthy figure to counter Isaac’s work as the doctor that brought him into this vile world. The issues though with his section is found in Goth’s character, and the ending of the film, as the screenplay leaves a lot of fruit on the vine, as we watch del Toro rush his conclusion of his epic instead taking his time and fleshing out more of the mortal, emotional, familial elements within Shelly’s original text. For as much as the film takes its time getting going, it sure does want to leave the party earlier than it needs to, and is rather frustrating in its resolution.
What can’t be denied is the scope that del Toro creates here, which is something that many viewers of his films know he won’t disappoint on. Between the slick editing by Evan Schhiff, to the luscious cinematography and costume design by Dan Laustsen and Kate Hawley, respectively, to the elegant, haunting score from Alexandre Desplat, Frankenstein is an embarrassment of riches from every craft department working on this massive project. For a production that cost in the ballpark of $120 million dollars, every inch of the screen is filled with exquisite detail and it’s highly impressive to see a movie of this size deliver on all technical aspects (besides those damn wolves). Between the committed work from Isaac and Elordi alongside an arsenal of some of the best artisans in the business working that peak of their powers, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein justifies its creation by its visionary creator, even though he should’ve allowed himself some more time in the laboratory to polish his script and the VFXs and deliver something that could’ve stood at the defining adaption of this material, instead being a satisfactory experiment in filmmaker’s filmography.
Grade: B
This review is from the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. Frankenstein will receive a limited theatrical run beginning October 17 and on Netflix November 7.
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