Guillermo Del Toro has some history with the Venice Film Festival, starting with Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006 and reaching its zenith with The Shape of Water, which won the director the Golden Lion back in 2017. He also has some history with creating fabulous and mythical creatures, including a faun and Hellboy, but Del Toro’s real fascination is with the very human monsters who require no prosthetics at all. This is true of his latest offering, Frankenstein, screening in Venice in competition.
The story opens with a prelude: it’s 1857 in the ‘extreme north’. A Danish ship is stuck in the ice and the crew is desperate to free it. Their work is interrupted by the sighting of a distant fire, leading them to a camp and an injured man, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). In hot (or cold) pursuit is the creature (Jacob Elordi), whose sole aim is to get his gigantic hands on his creator.
When the monster is kept at bay, at least temporarily, Victor proceeds to tell his tale to the captain. And thus begins Part One – Victor’s Tale, giving us a back story of Victor’s unhappy childhood. Poor little rich boy, cossetted by his lovely mother, treated harshly and lovelessly by his father (Charles Dance, in reliably cruel form). Now, lots of viewers might love this long-winded back story, but is it really necessary? In the same way we don’t need to know about Willy Wonka’s childhood, maybe we don’t need to know about Frankenstein’s either. All this background does is to forestall the creature’s appearance by over an hour.
The young adult Victor moves to Edinburgh, where he studies medicine and gets into trouble for his experiments with reanimation. He now looks like one of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood with his flowing locks and rakish neckerchief. Harlander (Christoph Walz), the Austrian arms dealer who will be bankrolling Victor’s experiments, gets to wear a pair of gold-heeled boots like a very rich Victorian pimp. Harlander reunites Victor with his brother William (Felix Kammerer), who is engaged to Harlander’s niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth).
If there is a little freedom with the men’s costumes, it’s nothing compared with the women’s (all designed by Kate Hawley, a regular Del Toro collaborator). Victor’s mother wears a red dress with a flowing chiffon twenty-metre train and a necklace seemingly made of miniature bones. Elizabeth stands out against the drab city hordes with her citronella and fuchsia garb. Her wedding dress includes ribbons adorning her arms that evoke a mummy and recall the bandaged face of the creature in earlier scenes. Women are often veiled, like creepy handmaids, whether at weddings or funerals.
Victor now pursues both his scientific quest and his brother’s fiancée. The scenes of chopping up of cadavers in the abandoned water tower-cum-laboratory, candle-lit dinners and the stitching together of his creation are all accompanied to music (by Alexandre Desplat) that is either jolly (cadavers) or heavy on the strings (wooing) before leading to the inevitable electrical storm and the creature’s awakening.
Part Two is all from the creature’s perspective, which is a quieter chapter. He talks of his escape from the laboratory, his loneliness and his brief period of happiness with the blind farmer. Inevitably, this will have most viewers fondly reminiscing about Gene Hackman’s fabulous cameo in Young Frankenstein, despite a perfectly fine performance from David Bradley. Elordi also gives a lovely performance as the cruelly maligned monster, his quiet despair countering the baroque arrogance of Isaac’s Victor.
And thus the film returns to the extreme north as the pursuit comes to its end. Del Toro paints a picture of man’s hubris and the monstrosity of those who relentlessly seek something with no consideration for anyone else (‘In seeking life, I created death’, ‘I never considered what would come after creation’). Perhaps he could have done this with a more nuanced touch, but subtlety has never been a Del Toro strongpoint. This is true of the screenplay (written by Del Toro), the costumes and the set design (by Tamar Deverell). Think Mary Shelley meets Crimson Peak. If you loved that film, you’ll love this. Some may balk at Elordi playing a monster, but – as Del Toro so floridly shows us – monsters might also appear in the guise of someone as lovely as Oscar Isaac.
