Frankenstein (2025)

Rated R for gore mostly.  Guillermo del Toro knows how to make gore somehow interesting.  Still, it doesn't change the fact that these are incredibly gory movies.  There's also one scene where Victor's rear end is shown for a more-than-necessary amount of time.  But the big thing you have to remember that del Toro is trying to scare you with a lot of the stuff he puts in his films.  There are some truly upsetting shots, even though it seems to capture the tone of Mary Shelley's work. R.

DIRECTOR:  Guillermo del Toro

I'm writing this immediately after writing my blog on The Alabama Solution.  If you are just reading everything that I write, first of all, thank you?  I don't know if that reader really exists out there, but I did get spammed by an "AI creator" to take one of his courses on Threads.  Maybe he's reading.  If so, thank you, but also cool it with AI, okay?  Anyway, still pretty traumatized, but I'm really trying to distract myself as I continually have chained panic attacks throughout the weekend.  Here's the deal.  I, again, watched Frankenstein before I decided to throw my entire life away for my morals.  I'm still kind of reeling, so I apologize if I don't do this blog justice.

I have had a theory that those who go into some kind of humanities / English-adjacent studies program are going to have to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein about four times before they die.  I'm the outlier.  I had to teach that book for years, which threw my numbers way off.  But I remember reading it in high school once and then having to read it for two seperate classes in college.  I have a love / hate relationship with the book.  I intellectually understand its brilliance.  Because of the novel, Mary Shelley became the de facto creator of science fiction.  And it is incredible.  Like, it's a way smarter book than anyone I know could do. It's deep.  It's insane that it was written basically on a bet.  And!  AND!  It kills the kid in the book.  Kids have plot armor all over them.  Every single Jurassic Park movie has a kid in it and the kid's always fine by the end.

But I think that the Universal Boris Karloff version did so much damage to the notion of the purpose of Frankenstein that there is a notion that completely contradicts the intentions of Mary Shelley.  It doesn't taken an English teacher like me (at least until Monday...) to inform you that the real villain of the piece is Victor Frankenstein.  That's the point.  The monster, for all of his violent deeds, is desperate for a moment's peace from any direction, especially from his creator.  Most of our criticism of the Universal Frankenstein is that the creature never really evolves beyond rudimentary speech.  It is incapable of higher level thought.  Other adaptations have rectified this.  But the bigger problem that I realized with the tonal shift of Guillermo del Toro's version of Frankenstein is in Oscar Isaac's performance.  Don't get me wrong, I think Oscar Isaac is great in everything, Frankenstein included.  But Jacob Elordi is the actor we're looking at for a reason.  Elordi has all of this emotional nuance with his creature that is just spot-on pitch perfect.  Oscar Isaac?  He's a little over the top and I don't think it is an accident.  The issue I'm dancing around is that the Universal Victor Frankenstein was always just a little too sympathetic to be considered an outright villain.

One of the themes of Frankenstein is that it is almost a work of anti-science.  Victor's largest crime in most adaptations is that he tried to play God and that is his biggest sin.  The distancing himself from the creature was always out of fright.  That's the way I always read it in the book.  I always found it odd that Victor devoted so much of his studies and obsessions to reanimating the dead that I found it somewhat disingenuous to think that, when he was ultimately successful, he would scream at the creature in fear.  The movie doesn't do that.  If anything, as accurate as the spirit of the film is, there is so much that shifts away from the original text.  This version of Victor makes him a barbaric disciplinarian, mirroring a father who beat him to learn whatever was necessary to become the best.  Victor initially embraces the creature, proud of his own success in this version.  The division that happens between Victor and the creature is almost that of that abusive father / son relationship that molded Victor into the callous jerk he is in the story.  I kind of like that better because it makes Victor far more culpable than the novel version who is simply reactionary to the surprise that he encounters. 

There are some changes that I don't quite understand, however.  Victor is a cold dude.  I get that.  The movie gives us a bunch of examples of Victor kind of being the worst and I'm all here for that. But I don't really understand the dynamic of Harlander and Victor.  Harlander funds Victor's work for the entire first act.  (Maybe del Toro painted himself into a corner by making this whole thing divided by act, then realized that Victor's story isn't all that compelling compared to the Creature's.) Harlander seems morally dubious throughout.  He has this secret which is revealed that he is close to death and wants to use Victor's reanimation technology to grant him a second chance at life.  He's also gross, tempting Victor with his niece in exchange for eternal life.  Okay.  But Victor doesn't grant Harlander extended life.  Now, I can see a version of this narrative that shows that Victor only cares about himself, which may be what del Toro and Isaac were pushing for with the scene right before the rise of the Creature.  But instead, I get the one of the few sympathetic moments where Victor explains that the technology was never really intended for that.  There's also the hiding of Harlander's corpse, which doesn't really come into play, especially considering that Victor and Elizabeth share such a complicated relationship. 

But it's the Creature I care about, right?  I can't stress enough that Elordi really brought his A-game.  It's the best of what the book had to offer.  The reason that I emotionally resonated with the Shelley novel wasn't the Victor elements.  It was always about the creature and the blind man.  Maybe that's the teacher in me (God, I don't know what I'm going to do if I don't stay a teacher.) And all of that.  All of that.  Honestly, getting the Creature to confront the boat captain from the framing narrative is perfect.  Because I always treated the Creature as more culpable than this movie let on.  This movie has him being incredibly violent.  But when the Creature takes a beat and explains the story from his perspective, oh my goodness.  Sure, the wolves thing feels like a bit of a cop out.  But I do like the fact that the blind man's family is still no good.  I just have to say that.

Can we also talk about how this movie looks?  Golly, Guillermo del Toro knows how to make a pretty movie.  I've never seen Crimson Peak, but I get the vibe that Crimson Peak was a dry run of what he wanted to do with this because this movie looks like art.  Sure, there ware some Tim Burton vibes at times in this film.  It's the whole macabre thing that both of them share.  But I always feel like del Toro uses that dark aesthetic as a romantic thing as opposed to a twee thing.  (I don't even know if that word's appropriate anymore.) Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein feels almost like a spiritual successor to something like Barry Lyndon (a movie I have yet to see and am too embarrassed to admit that I haven't seen it.) It is just cinematic as can be.

So why isn't it a perfect score for me?  Honestly, for such a long movie (I also hate that every Academy Award nominated film feels the need to be two-and-a-half-plus hours) there are so many beats that don't really either fit in the film or are left incomplete. The changing of Elizabeth is possibly one of the more curious beats.  I get it.  We need to have Victor a little bit more gross than normal. I've already spoken to this. But beyond that, why is Elizabeth Victor's sister-in-law.  It makes her flirtation with Victor odd.  Yes, I get that Victor is attracted to Elizabeth.  But Elizabeth has two very separate reactions to Victor.  She finds him replulsive and seemingly flirts with him.  I do have to remember that this is an epistolary novel.  Victor is telling the story from his perspective, which means we might have a little bit of an unreliable narrator.  But Elizabeth feels really incomplete in the story.

Still, this is a pretty rock solid del Toro.  I mean, it's not hitting my top del Toro movies.  But in terms of cinematic impressiveness?  Incredibly solid.  Now to panic myself to sleep.  Pray for me.