Frankenstein

Like all of Guillermo del Toro’s films, Frankenstein is a visual wonderment. The film moves from a pale Arctic tundra to a verdant French countryside, and we experience the inside of a creaky Danish sailing ship and a cavernous Gothic castle. Director del Toro immerses viewers in richly decorated tableaus—which can also sometimes be quite grisly. As a story, though, del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 200-year-old horror novel is almost entirely devoid of beauty. A persistent nihilism makes Frankenstein a depressing 2½ hours. Still, a ray of truth pierces the darkness: Prideful, self-serving men bent on dethroning God destroy themselves and others, and after they’re gone, they leave the world to contend with the monsters they created.

The film opens with a Prelude set on an ice-encrusted three-masted schooner stuck in a frozen sea near the North Pole. The crew finds a badly injured Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) on the snowy plain and carries him on board. In Part 1, Frankenstein recounts to the ship’s captain (Lars Mikkelsen) through flashbacks all the events that brought him to that point, starting with a troubled childhood dominated by a father (Charles Dance) who “despised” him. Frankenstein’s Creature (Jacob Elordi), who’s been searching for his maker, forces his way onto the ship, and in Part 2 of the film, he tells his side of the story. (The film has a few expletives, some brief nudity, and several bloody and violent images.)

After Victor’s mother dies during the birth of his younger brother William, Victor swears he “will conquer death.” Years later, in a laboratory funded by wealthy arms dealer Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), Victor stitches the body parts of slain soldiers into a single grotesque frame. With electricity directed into its nervous and lymphatic systems, the Creature comes to life. Harlander desperately hopes Victor’s ghastly surgeries will provide the means to preserve his own disease-wracked body after his death. Victor does have a few detractors, but not many.

A tribunal judge investigating Dr. Frankenstein’s unorthodox experiments admonishes, “God gives life, and God takes it, Victor.”

“Perhaps God is inept,” Victor replies, drawing cheers from the spectators. “And it is we who must amend his mistakes … free of fear and cowardly dogma.”

Del Toro’s screenplay sews together Shelley’s characters with altered plot details (perhaps believing he can build a better Frankenstein than the original author’s?). For example, the monster in Shelley’s book saves a young girl’s life, while the Creature in del Toro’s Frankenstein performs no heroic acts—unless you count achieving self-acceptance. Also, Shelley’s monster takes revenge on innocent parties and dies, while del Toro’s Creature uses lethal violence to fend off attacks and is unhappily immortal. And an odd love rectangle of sorts develops in the film: William (Felix Kammerer) is engaged to Harlander’s niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth), who rebuffs Victor’s advances and seems to take more than a sympathetic interest in the Creature.

The staying power of Shelley’s Frankenstein goes to show that each generation has its mad scientists who trample moral guardrails in the quest for technology that will deliver godlike power. Today, those mad scientists head some of the major software firms driving artificial intelligence advancements. And just like Victor Frankenstein, they blithely unleash their powerful creations, but they don’t want to take responsibility for what they have wrought.