When the metaphorical curtain rose on a sea of white Antarctic snow in Guillermo del Toro’s recent screen adaptation of Frankenstein, this filmgoer could not help but smile. Ah, framing device! I thought; indeed, the nesting doll structure of Mary Shelley’s legendary 1818 novel is not only a staple of high school English classes but one of the details that makes it worth returning to, so culturally persistent in its multilayered tragedy, this complex and unforgettable tale of mankind’s hubris and the pain it can beget, on all accords, when taken too far.
But del Toro had to go and bugger it up. Victor Frankenstein begins to recite his story, movie happens, and then comes the knock on the door: the monster — portrayed by Jacob Elordi — arrives, not at the film’s end but somewhere in the middle. It is then that we, otherwise captivated by del Toro’s imaginative interpretation of Shelley, get to hear his side of the story — but wouldn’t he have already told it to Victor when the wedding fiasco happened? And just like that, something that was so perfect to become renowned ducked into a plot hole.
Many of del Toro’s other changes are admittedly not as distracting, as inexplicable as making Elizabeth not Victor’s bride-to-be but his brother’s may sound on paper. And changing an adapted classic to reveal new layers of the source material’s themes is nothing new, nor is it inherently sacrilegious. Del Toro’s wielding of Frankenstein in particular centers around commentaries on family; Victor’s mother dies not from scarlet fever but her birth to his younger brother, William, who becomes his father’s favorite — you get the idea.
As for what the boy grows up to birth, Jacob Elordi provides in the role of the monster what ought to be considered one of the greatest performances for the screen in recent memory, if not in the lineage of cinema. His monster is a truly tragic figure both in situation and form, as gangly as he is graceful, long with both sorrow and triumph. The raw and unfiltered emotion behind his performance is most damning when paired with Oscar Issacs’s Victor, whose reaction to realizing he has played God is not one of fear, but degradation. Their dynamic is reminiscent of a worst case scenario for a disabled child, his parent unable to see him as anything but a failure without doing anything to improve his circumstances, introduce him to his capabilities. These scenes of Victor’s abuse were genuinely harrowing and brought me to tears multiple times — they are truly not for the faint of heart, and they only make the monster’s perspective, however oddly inserted, more powerful. As he learns not only to read but of his own intelligence after his escape, now aware of himself as a carrier of positive change and true humanity, his stringy black hair growing longer as he soaks up the world, it is as if the boulder of what that world was set up to be has slowly, gently rolled off his shoulders, set him free.
Elordi’s scarred Adonis is but one crucial component to the film’s peerless imagery. Its entire look, electrified with vibrant jeweline colors, creates a world as embodying of the conflict between science and emotion as it is obsessed with it, though the uber-modern unsteady camerawork can prove distracting. The costume design in particular ought to win the film the highest awards, especially those for Issacs’s Victor and Mia Goth’s Elizabeth, who both look as if they stepped out of a Ken Russell draft. (Issacs’s plagiarism from Gabriel Byrne in Russell’s own tackling of a Frankenstein story, 1986’s Gothic, was certainly not lost on me.)
However, del Toro’s uneven use of shock value betrays any attempt at calling him a bonafide successor to British cinema’s enfant terrible, of whom he is a known fan. An early scene of Victor presenting an early reanimation experiment is utterly and appropriately skin-crawling. But later, when he scopes out potential guinea pigs from a line of men waiting for the gallows, a hanged man twitching in the background is not only unneeded — and completely distracting from the dialogue — but harrowingly crass. This is a film that, through Elordi’s performance, highlights a character isolated from society for his differences. And when a modern audience is shown a noose, they are most likely going to see a symbol of suicide, an act that the monster begins to seek as he reckons with the “merciless life” he has been dealt by his illegitimate animation. So what good does it do to trivialize such vulgar imagery, revel in it even for just one inconsequential scene, for a world where the monster’s plight is still reflected in the experiences of so many?
Violent spars between sheep and wolves, which could have been easily cut away from without diminishing the monster’s response of sorrow, are also utterly unneeded. These scenes lead one to ask himself why is this film is so obsessed with the suffering of creatures as to litter itself with these images as if they were entrails. This animal violence in particular is accompanied by some hokey script about the two species not actually hating each other, but doing so because of the whims of society, or something equally as appallingly obvious. This reliance on dumbed down cultural commentary plagues an otherwise fine script. It is most prevalent from Goth’s Elizabeth, quick to speak and highly questioning of Victor, at first hating him, then falling into a fling with him. The first interaction between the two was painful to observe in the blatancy of the pair’s dynamic, a reminder of how moviegoing audiences — or, perhaps, audiences as they are perceived by today’s scriptwriters — love an intelligent female character when she verbally ravages the male lead whose shoes, however fitting of us, we are supposed to imagine ourselves in; but how do these same filmgoers react when women in the real world assert themselves, speak freely and intelligently?
And how do we learn true lessons from these films or any art form if we are not exposed to anything new, anything actually revolutionary? Visual spectacle cannot make up for a derelict script, no matter how headline-grabbing. Thus is the film’s conclusion: in Shelley’s Frankenstein, Elizabeth’s centering in the monster’s revenge on Victor reveals the full potential of the monster’s wrath when pushed to his limit, what violence he is able to inflict on others in lieu of being capable of ending his own, limitless suffering. Del Toro literally puts the gun in Victor’s hands instead, with the bride-to-be making herself a human shield as he tries to shoot his baby down. We get a frustratingly tender, Eggers-pinching moment of the monster cradling her as she dies, which — paired with his ultimate forgiveness of Victor — almost unnerved me to no end. It pains me to think of what audiences will assume Shelley meant in the penning of her original book and even more concerning that a male director’s rewriting of what has been historically considered a masterpiece could, with pop-cultural osmosis and declining rates of casual reading, completely change the public’s perceptions on the Shelley’s more than monochromatic explorations of morality.
Guillermo del Toro has become a titanic figure over the the past few years with his films gaining wider audiences in the western world, and his recent statements against artificial intelligence have confirmed his status as a supposed creative savior in a world gone queasy. But what amount of practical effects can make up for the manners in which he has disguised lackadaisical revisionism as true innovation? Forced black-and-white sentimentality is the opposite of what any alienated public needs and especially not now. And as more and more people rebel against this new complacency and actively seek out works that stimulate the mind, it is cruel for a film by such a spearhead of cinema’s potential to succumb to the allure of the blockbuster, especially a film that is otherwise so colorful, so brimming with life. What is truly revolutionary, in any time, is nuance.
Cover Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash
