Guillermo del Toro achieves his life-long dream, adapting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with resplendent results.
Guillermo del Toro first voiced his dream of making a "faithful Miltonian tragedy" version of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' back in 2007, just after announcing himself to the world at large with the haunting fairytale Pan's Labyrinth. By that point he already had six feature films under his belt, but it was his spellbinding story of a young girl in Francoist Spain that truly lit the match – ever since del Toro has risen to become one of the most beloved and singular filmmakers of his generation, defined by his vast imagination, unmistakable passion and infectious enthusiasm for storytelling. It's easy to understand what has kept the flame of 'Frankenstein' alight in him: Shelley's groundbreaking creation is the ultimate monster story, and all of del Toro's creatures possess a similar soul sadness. After almost 20 years, the filmmaker has achieved his Sisyphean task, gathering not only Shelley's original novel but many of its subsequent spawn and from their parts fashioned something beautiful and alive all of his own.
It's reasonable to see Frankenstein as the culmination of a career obsessed with outsiders, even as far back as his very first planned stop-motion project Omnivore about a lizard-man ultimately scrapped after the sets and puppets were destroyed by vandals. From Chronos to Pinnocchio his work is fascinated by the fantastical in both people and surroundings, and the sumptuous operatic fairytale del Toro has crafted now contains in its DNA the fabric of everything that came before it, a seamless patchwork that's self-referential but never self-indulgent. Similarly, his vision of Victor Frankenstein's creation brings little of the body horror that has always afflicted the popular versions of the story from Karloff to de Niro. Here the Creature is ethereal – a creation, never a mistaken. His pale skin resembles marble and the deep scars delineating his body reference anatomical studies. This is a creature born of love, not hate. The hate came after.
Jacob Elordi (who came to the film only nine weeks before shooting after Andrew Garfield dropped out) is astonishing, imbuing the Creature with a child-like sense of wonder and pathos. It's a performance that possesses an incredible amount of thought and feeling, even down to the way the Creature speaks English with an accent that mimics the peasant who taught him rather than his "father". He truly moves like an infant in the body of a grown man, desperately trying to reconcile brain and body, his soulful eyes gazing out at the world with equal parts wonder and worry, for he quickly comes to learn there is as much cruelty in it as there is beauty. These two opposing forces are exemplified by Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and Elizabeth (Mia Goth), Victor's future sister-in-law whose own desire for freedom and experience mirrors that of Frankenstein's creature. They are twin flames, tragically bisected by the folly of Frankenstein, a grandly talented grand egotist who fancies himself a renegade but really apes his own abusive father.
Operatic in both mode and scale, with the central set of Frankenstein's laboratory resembling a stage in the road and the good doctor himself a raconteur obsessed with his own mythological greatness, del Toro achieves a vision that channels Shelley's spirit while avoiding a retread of old ground. Naturally in a career defined by his own obsession with the Frankenstein story there have been elements of it in all his work – particularly Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water – so del Toro transports the drama to Victorian Europe as the Crimean War rages. Surrounded by death, Victor attempts to create life. Isaac, afforded a rare leading role, is magnetic – madly egotistical but also madly brilliant, charming and cruel and yet still with that same childlike spark of enthusiasm recognisable in Elizabeth and the Creature. Together they form a triad: The Father, The Son and The Mother Mary, as del Toro grapples with the nature of burden, sin and sacrifice on a holy level.
More remarkable still is that del Toro wrote 95% of the script himself, as there are lines of dialogue on a par with Shelley and the decision to place Frankenstein more in the melodramatic fairytale tradition rather than the period drama or gothic horror avoids the film too closely resembling any one of his past works. The result is profoundly moving; a father-son story as much as a treaty on the perversion of science in the hands of greedy men. There is a profound richness to the surrounding world, from the water tower where Victor sets up his laboratory to the intricate animatronics that are at once horrifying and compelling. As del Toro is a fierce champion of practical effects and building worlds wherever possible, it's no great surprise that the tactile elements of Frankenstein feel so thought out and intricate, but this shouldn't be taken for granted (especially since the only slightly hokey work in the film is on the CGI animals that guide the Creature into the world as angels heralded the arrival of God's only son).
Just as Shelley's text was born out of her own status as a young woman reckoning with societal constrictions on women and a desire for freedom as well as her own sadness regarding never knowing her mother, there is something dazzlingly contemporary about del Toro's Frankenstein, radical in both its empathy for the most vulnerable (while not expecting them to be perfect) and its reverence for the natural world being eroded by the relentless pursuit of capitalism masquerading as progress – it's no surprise the closest thing the film has to a true villain is Christoph Waltz's smarmy arms dealer Harland. But it's the film's epitaph which provides the key to not only this dream two decades in the realising, but del Toro's entire project, a canon of outsiders and freaks learning to come alive in a world hostile to difference. It is a line from Lord Byron's poem 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage', about a young man searching for meaning in the world after a life of empty pleasure: "And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on."
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