Young Australian star Jacob Elordi doesn’t look much like Boris Karloff. His casting as the monster is one of the most disarming aspects of Guillermo del Toro’s bold, visually stunning but frequently jarring rework of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (screening in competition in Venice). The Mexican director has chosen to emphasise the romanticism at the expense of the horror. Elordi plays the creature as a misunderstood, James Dean-like outsider with Oedipal issues rather than as an agent of evil and chaos. Even if his face and torso are latticed with suitably grotesque scars, staples and stitches, he is not only the most sympathetic character in the movie but the best-looking one too. It’s left to Oscar Isaac to provide the real villainy as the brilliant but egomaniacal scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who “fathers” the monster but then promptly disowns him.
Audiences are already so steeped in Frankenstein myth that it’s doubtful they can watch this film with innocent eyes. They have had the Universal movies; Mel Brooks’ classic spoof Young Frankenstein; the Hammer horrors; Kenneth Branagh’s blunt Nineties stab at the material; Yorgos Lanthimos’s similarly themed Alasdair Gray adaptation, Poor Things, and even Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. This may well be a far more faithful interpretation of the novel than most of its predecessors, but that doesn’t mean it can exorcise their memory.
Isaac’s performance is mannered and uneven. The film quotes Byron, and you half expect the actor to portray Victor as a dashing and poetic figure. Instead, in the scenes when Victor is the rebel scientist, scandalising Edinburgh’s medical establishment with his “galvanic” experiments, he is strangely sinister. As he rolls his eyeballs, fidgets and jumps around, it’s very hard to muster much sympathy for him. Isaac registers much more strongly after he is brought low, when he is playing Victor as a broken and despairing man with a prosthetic leg, on his grim Arctic quest to destroy his own creation.
Few contemporary directors can match Del Toro’s visual flair or his imagination. His film is full of brilliantly staged set-pieces. It opens in vivid and rousing fashion as Danish explorers discover the badly wounded Victor and bring him aboard their ship. Soon the monster turns up too. The sailors do everything they can to wipe him out but he keeps on coming back, like a stain that can never be removed.
In terms of craft, there is much to admire here. Whether it’s the battlefield where Victor goes in search of body parts, or the muddy, blood-spattered Edinburgh streets where public hangings are still held, every location is lovingly detailed. Costume and production design are impeccable. The actors do their best, too. Christopher Waltz brings his familiar sneer to the role of the dapper, top-hat-wearing industrialist who bankrolls Victor’s experiments. Mia Goth provides emotional depth with her portrayal of Elizabeth, the beautiful, steely and highly intelligent young entomologist due to marry Victor’s brother William (Felix Kammerer) but with whom Victor falls in love. Almost as if this is a courtroom drama, the storytelling also remains even-handed. We hear Victor’s version of events first. He tells his life story to the gnarled Danish sea captain, played by Lars Mikkelsen. “In seeking life, I created death,” Victor laments, giving way to acute self-pity. Then, it’s the monster’s turn – and he proves such a poetic and tormented witness that audience sympathies are bound to swing firmly behind him.
Unfortunately, Frankenstein continually risks losing its footing. The film lurches between scenes of lush romantic melodrama and moments of Grand Guignol bloodletting. We know very quickly that the monster cannot die. That means any suspense risks ebbing away. For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.
Dir: Guillermo Del Toro. Starring: Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Charles Dance. 149 mins
‘Frankenstein’ is released in cinemas on 17 October, and streams on Netflix from 7 November
