The story of Frankenstein and his monster is one of the classics that has been remade countless times and I’m sure this won’t be the last time. It doesn’t always get a treatment from an iconic director carrying a fanbase and buzz like del Toro though. Those who might normally skip just-another-monster-movie may well be drawn in by interest in this artist’s take. Basically that was me on this one. The only other recent Frankenstein movie I have seen was the one with Daniel Radcliffe in it, and I only watched it because I had a role as a background extra – else I’d have skipped that too.
So, what did I think of the film? I’m going to do this review a bit differently to usual. I’ll start with a brief overview, then go into spoilers to discuss my problems with it.
So let’s start with the good stuff. The visuals are what you would expect from del Toro. The fantastic and fantastical gothic and steampunk, incredible detail in darkness, creating an unmistakable atmosphere. It is a good looking movie, with great effects, even in the grotesque. This fantasy horror mixed with science fiction has been the budget and art direction it deserves.
Del Toro has made the story his own. The film admits to being based on the book rather than a faithful adaptation, giving it leeway to play with the source material. Gone are the metal bolts on the monster’s neck, but a big menacing tower for a mad scientist are absolutely welcome in del Toro’s space.
The story is structured through the sandwich method of beginning near the end with the events leading up to it being narrated in flashbacks. Throughout the thrust of the film the viewer is waiting to learn how things got to the situation presented in the opening. It gives a mystery that keeps you hooked in. At least it should if you aren’t loosely familiar with the classic story, although in this adaptation based on the book, there is still the aspect of the original twist to wait for. So it works.
3/5
– Spoilers Abound Below
As the point of this article is to look more at the issues I had with it, I will leave the overview there and move into spoilers about what spoiled the film for me.
Small niggles
I am going to start with these because putting them at the end seems anticlimactic.
When Frankenstein decides that the monster was a mistake, he chooses to destroy him along with the entire lab and all of his work. This might be a crazy decision in itself, but that’s what Victor does. He immediately changes his mind when he hears the monster screaming for help, and ends up seriously injuring himself trying to save him. However, the monster remembers that he has super strength and breaks the chains containing him in the basement, allowing him to escape. Which essentially means he could have broken the chains at any time. He definitely wanted to and didn’t understand why he was being locked up. It makes little sense that he would politely wait for an emergency and permission from Victor.
Skipping ahead, later in the film, the monster returns to discover his roots. In the wreckage of the burned down building, he finds a notebook containing all of the information that he needs.
He found a book, made of paper, in a tower burned to the ground using gallons of fuel. The exact book that contained all of the answers that he needed. Crazy convenient. It’s one of those things that needed to happen for the story to progress, but… there must have been a better way.
Later, the creature kills Victor’s brother. Dying in Victor’s arms, he tells him “You are the monster”. This felt very on the nose. We all know by now that Victor was the real monster.
Finally, as I mentioned, the story is told through flashbacks as it is regaled to a sea Captain. The captain was understandably curious about why Victor was laid wounded in the snow, but I don’t know why he didn’t question why the story was starting in his childhood. I guess he had nothing better to do for two hours.
Victor’s Inconsistency
So now onto a bigger problem with the film: the characters.
I mentioned before Victor flip-flopping on his decision to kill the monster. This feels like a theme throughout.
The beginning of the film sets up his obsession with beating death, and creating immortality. After a demonstration to leaders of the scientific community where his ideas a shot down as abomination, a man named Henrich Harlander offers to provide him all the funding that he needs. Victor doesn’t jump at the chance despite that being all he wanted. It turns out that Harlander’s niece Elizabeth is engaged to Victor’s brother William. He later accepts Harlander’s offer after getting to know him a little better.
We learn that Victor is not averse to manipulation, stretching and bending truths, and being quite single minded in his goals. The loss of his mother led to him wanting to find a way to beat death.
Eventually Victor builds the lab of his dream, has all the corpses he needs, and figures out exactly how to create his creature. The night has come for him to complete his work and Harlander reveals the true reason that he has given unlimited funding.
Harlander is terminally ill and wants to be put into a new body. Victor refuses him. I don’t know why. Victor says that Harlander is contaminated and it won’t work, which could well be true, but seems to fly in the face of the character. He was someone who wanted his work to save lives, but he refused his friend and benefactor asking him to save him. He also forgot his manipulative ways when he didn’t just appease Harlander by telling him that they could discuss it later after the experiment. This felt very much like an example of a character making a stupid decision only for the reason that the story couldn’t carry on if they didn’t.
There were all sorts of things he could have said and done instead of ending up in a physical fight, damaging equipment, and Harlander dead.
So the experiment is a success, the creature is born, and Victor immediately chains him up in the basement despite it showing no threat. He goes on to study him, try to teach him, but in the process abuses him physically and mentally. He insists on referring to him as ‘it’, even after Elizabeth meets the creature and describes him as pure. He is frustrated that the only word the creature says is ‘Victor’, but she points out that it could be that he is the most important thing in the creature’s whole world.
Eventually, Victor gets fed up that the creature doesn’t seem to be learning and decides to kill him. No consideration for him being a major success in his work, and possibly a stepping stone to further improvements. He just decides to destroy it all, rather than build on his achievement.
Which is jarring considering this was his life’s work and obsession, and he had a moment of wondering what to do next after finishing what he set out to do. He had not beaten death yet. He had lots of work to do and the perfect lab to do it in.
Victor offers the creature one last chance to show he can say another word. The creature succeeds. So Victor tries and fails to kill the creature anyway. Then immediately tries and fails to save the creature. He goes on with his life assuming that the creature died, but he had actually made an enemy of it.
The creature catches up with him and asks him to make him a companion. The creature could not die, so he wanted someone to share eternity with. Victor refuses, and from there makes attempts to kill the invincible man. The creature gives him the choice of making a companion or ending his life, him perhaps being the only one who could do it after having created him.
Strangely, the creature then tries to run away from the man that he wants to kill him. The creature purposely hurts Victor every time he fails to kill him, making his task all the more difficult.
This brings the story back to the beginning, where they finally find each other again. These two who have only wished each other harm make peace, and forgive one another. The creature even calls him ‘father’ though that relationship had never been mentioned before.
It is hard to understand Victor’s motivations throughout the film, when they keep seeming to change. Maybe after hearing the monster’s story, his mind was changed, and he understood a different perspective.
Elizabeth
William’s fiance, Henrich’s niece is introduced as an odd character. She is sat with three men of business and science. Henrich and William excuse themselves when they sense she is about to rant about her silly ideas. She then described how she hates war, senseless death, and how leaders sit in ivory towers while they treat their people like pawns. All very sensible ideas.
She is framed as a pure woman, fresh from a convent, who cares about goodness and doing the right thing. She is engaged to William, but Victor tries to seduce her from him. She is briefly tempted, but the good woman chooses William. However, when she finds the creature, she seems strangely attracted to him. Zombies features seem to not bother her. She sees him as pure, and perhaps even a new creation that is better than sinful humans. When the monster crashes her wedding, she asks him to take her away with him. To be fair to her, despite his patched up grey skin, he is strangely good looking for a monster.
She is a strange character, but my complaint is more with the performance. Mia Goth, who, as an aside, looks like the exact halfway point between Sydney Sweeney and Shelley Duvall, makes me wonder how bad actors get jobs in Hollywood, one of the most competitive job markets in the world. She delivers her lines as if she has learned the script but hasn’t understood that they should contain emotions. She doesn’t give much of an impression of purity, more of blandness and compliance. The rest of the cast are so strong, that this just about passable performance really stands out.
Angry Monster
I have been tossing up between referring to the character as the creature and the monster throughout this article. This is again down to inconsistency.
The film seems to want to set up the creature as pure and good. He would be misconceived as a monster and misunderstood.
However, the monster lives up to his reputation in many scenes. The opening sequence has him brutally kill six men as he hunts for Victor. Scenes like this take a place a few times.
My memory of the creature, and why Victor is famously known as ‘the real monster’, is that any harm he does is by mistake, not knowing his own strength, or self-defence. He can maintain his status as innocent. That is not possible in this film. He purposely tortures Victor, he kills men in his way when he knows full well that he is indestructible and unstoppable. He fails to speak to people and explain things when he is completely capable of speech and reason. He breaks a man’s face in half for simply thinking that the creature has murdered his father. Yes, the man attacked him, but the attack was not effective and had no chance of being.
It became very difficult to root for the creature when he became a violent monster intent on revenge. Especially after he killed William on his wedding day. You might just about excuse the monster killing people who were shooting at him, but throwing a man across the room because he thought you were killing or kidnapping his wife crosses a line.
The final reconciliation of the characters at the end rang hollow when both characters were just awful.
