Guillermo del Toro paints a cinematic masterpiece with Frankenstein using the subject of Mary Shelley’s novel with his cast as his brilliant cast featuriing Jacob Elordi to paint his personal and powerful story! This is a lifelong obsession for the director and writer that shows in his Bleak House displays. There are many representations in del Toro’s collection of the 1931 classic with Boris Karloff and comic book artist, Bernie Wrightson. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus has been a long lasting classic since its publication on 1818. The film opened on October 17th and is currently streaming on Netflix. The first film adaptation is the 1915 movie, Life Without Soul that is now lost. The Universal Pictures film was directed by James Whale with Karloff making a defining performance as the Creature with makeup by Jack Pierce. Whale also directed the sequel with Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with Elsa Lanchester as The Bride. These are the sketches that formed the early vision for del Toro.
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) was the first of the Hammer Films that starred Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as the Creature. One of the best adaptations is Young Frankenstein (1974) by Mel Brooks, respectful to the 1931 film, and funny! Kenneth Branagh adapted the novel in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). Del Toro’s last film was another of his loves with the stop motion animated film, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022). It begins with the Prelude set in the arctic snow of the “Farthermost North, 1857.” A lone violin is heard from Alexandre Desplat’s score. Desplat also collaborated on the score of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. We come across the expedition ship, the Horizon, is trapped in the ice. Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) looks out to the horizon as his crew works to break the ice. Mikkelsen had played Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Star Wars series, Ahsoka (2023).
Chief Officer Larsen (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) tells the captain in Dutch that the men are exhausted and wants to head back to St. Petersburg. Captain Anderson, Walton in the novel, shouts to the crew that they must head to the North Pole, his obsession,rather than returning in defeat. The prelude uses the novel’s structure which starts with Captain Walton’s narrative told through letters to his sister. He climbs up to the deck to head to his cabin. At night, Larsen points out to the captain that there is an explosion two miles from the ship. Captain Anderson takes a group out to investigate with torches. They find blood, a ruined sled, sled dogs, and a wounded man. The bearded, exhausted man (Oscar Isaac) is wounded on the shoulder and thought to have a broken leg, but it is really a prosthetic leg. Isaac was in this year’s drama, In the Hand of Dante. They hear a roar and Anderson orders the man taken to the ship as they see a large shadow in the darkness.
The man whom Shelley identifies as "the stranger" is hauled up and the captain orders a group of riflemen to get ready. The riflemen’s volley staggers the figure in a dark coat (Jacob Elordi). A powerful role for Elordi known for playing Nate Jacobs in the teen drama, Euphoria. The night snow is given an unnatural, dark green color. Another volley and then The Creature snarls, he is skull-like, under the triangular hood of his coat. Anderson calls for a retreat and the Creature begins to crush and toss men to their deaths! The captain asks the silent man what is it that followed him. The Creature is ringed with crewmen as he reaches the deck. He shouts, “Bring him to me!” A terrifying beginning and the original novel had no encounter with the Creature. The Creature tears into the crew as Anderson calls for Larsen to bring the blunderbuss. It is a powerful, large calibur firearm called in Dutch the “thunder box.” He reaches out for the wounded man and says, “Victor!” Larsen brings up the blunderbuss to blast the Creature with several shots that blast him from the ship.
The Creature rises and then slams into the ship, nearly overturning it, and shouts, “Bring him to me!” The captain takes the blunderbuss with the last shot and shoots the ice sending cracks around the Creature. He is dropped into the darkness of the icy waters. This is fascinating to have the Creature and Victor from the perspective of the captain and the crew. In the captain’s cabin, Dr. Udsen (Jachim Fjelstrup) brings laudanu, opium powder in alchohol, to Victor for the pain. This is in English. Captain Anderson introduces himself and the ship, the Horizont. Victor wants to know how many men were killed. The captain says six and Victor shouts that there will be more until they give him to it. Victor uses the inhuman “it” here. Even though trapped in the ice, Victor says it cannot die, he had tried to destroy it. Victor wants Anderson’s promise to put him back on the ice when it returns. The captain wants to know what is it and who created the Creature. As the crew stands guard around the ship, Anderson is told the man they saved is called Victor Frankenstein.
Victor tells him that what he tells him is partly fact, but all true. He begins his story that he says started with his father and mother. This “Part I: Victor’s Tale.” In the aristocratic house, the Baroness Claire (Caroline in Shelley's novel) Frankenstein in a sweeping, red dress searches for Victor before the arrival of his father. Almost unrecognizable, she is played by Mia Goth, who was in last year’s slasher film that finished the X trilogy; MaXXXine. The elaborate costumes by Kate Hawley evokes her work on Crimson Peak (2015). Young Victor Frankenstein (Christian Convery) is sitting in a chair. Convery played young versions of characters in this year’s horror adapatation of Stephen King in The Monkey. Victor in narration explains that his father was a baron and a surgeon. He had married his wife out of convienence. The imposing figure of the Baron Leopold Frankenstein (Charles Dance) leaves the black carriage to see his family. Dance had also played the same role as the baron in Victor Frankenstein (2015).
Victor says that his father was mostly absent so then he would have the attention of his mother. At the dinner table, the baron soaks up some dessert in blood, then gives it to his wife saying the salt is nutritious for her baby. Later, young Victor prays to a statue of his guardian angel, but overhears his parents’ arguing. Victor narrates that his father was jealous that he shared the same dark hair as Claire. The baron questions his son about medical measurements. He answers while drinking a glass of milk and assembling a figure of a woman with a baby. Young Victor can’t remember about a valve and the baron takes up a switch, not to hit Victor’s hands which he will need as a surgeon, and instead slashes his face! I really like Victor allying with his mother, but the baron is cruel. He plays cards with his mother who suddenly has sharp birthing pains, Victor calls over his father, and he is left with blood on his face. There is a white stone coffin of Baroness Claire Frankenstein.
Later, we see young William, his brother with fair hair, playing with his doting father. Victor confronts his father in the study about failing to save Claire. Baron Frankenstein says that death cannot be cheated. Victor says he will conqueror death. At night, Victor sees a vision of the Dark Angel, the statue in red surrounded by fire! We return to the ice where the hands of the Creature breaks free! It starts to walk towards the ship. Then, Victor narrates that the family fortune was lost and we see the black stone coffin of the Baron. He explains that William was sent to Vienna while he went to London and then Edinburgh. The novel has Victor going to the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. He later set up a laboratory in the Orkney Islands of Scotland to create the bride. Now we see the adult Victor presenting to the Royal College of Medicine in 1855. While Victor speaks about life and death, a man in a blue suit, known later as Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) enters. Waltz voiced Count Volpe in Guillermo del Toro's Pinoccho. Harlander is an original creation for the film.
Victor brings papers, sketches of a body, to the tribunal and then holds up a cylinder. He inserts the cylinder in his device, glowing red, before the covered experiment. Victor says the miracle is to stop death which gets applause from the audience. Professor Krempe (Ralph Ineson) strikes a gavel to demand silence. Ineson voiced Galactus in Fantastic Four: First Steps. Victor pulls the cloth from his subject, a shocked gasp from the audience, it is a deceased man with one arm, chest leading to a spinal cord, and the head of the former carpenter, brain exposed. It is gruesome; half laboratory experiment and half-corpse from the morgue. Next, Victor places the second cylinder, and the audiences moves forward. Suddenly, the subject gasps, moving by electricity explained by Victor. The professors think it is a trick. Victor picks up an apple, tosses it to the subject, and it is caught and studied. Three of the tribunal’s professors go to scream at Victor and his abomination.
The apple is thrown aside and caught by Harlander. Interesting connection there. Victor screams back that it should be studied. He yanks out a needle that ends the subject. Victor walks away, carrying his briefcast, into an alleyway that is filled with butchers. Blood pools at the feet of Harlander who was waiting for him. Harlander gives Victor a letter from his brother, William. He explains that William is getting married to his neice, Elizabeth Harlander. She was Elizabeth Lavenza in the novel and Elizabeth was adopted by Victor's family, and she grew up with him. Harlander shows Victor her photograph. Victor’s study is a small room filled with busts exposing their brains, and all manner of dusty books, beakers with liquid, and skeletons. This imagery strongly reminds me of Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein (1983) whose illustrations were inspirational for del Toro. He tosses the apple back to Victor. Harlander admires Victor’s work, but thinks he was too hasty in bringing his experiment to the college.
He continues that William and Elizabeth will arrive in three days and promises to change his life. Victor walks the Edinburgh streets and at Harlander’s house, he has set up a display of a skull and flowers. Harlander behind his wet plate camera and stand asks his subject, a woman in a Greek robe, to turn the peach. He is upset that she bit the peach. Harlander tells her the peach is a “symbol of life and youth.” Victor is announced and enters, Harlander looks through Victor’s papers, he says that he is using the nervous system, but it will only temporarily sustain life. Victor is brought a glass of milk, thematically the milk may represent purity, and Harlander says he was an army surgeon. Harlander admits he is an arms dealer. He brings up the Evelyn Tables to Victor, fine dissections of the body, and says that there is a fifth table. Harlander’s discovery is revealed, the lymphatic system, now black lines lacquered on a plank. Harlander points out the system around the heart, but Victor turns him around to point to the spinal cord. He offers to fund Victor’s research.
Then, Elizabeth and William are introduced. In the room with the camera, a now older William (Felix Kammerer) waits, and then is happily reunited with Victor. Kammerer played Paul Bäumer in the adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). William shows Victor his fiancée, Elizabeth (Goth) in an elaborate dark green dress,with a headdress of feathers like a peacock. She regards the skull from Harlander’s memento mori. Victor is entranced by her. Interesting to see first her interest in the skull, death, and her introduction as an adult. He is obsessed with his creation and Elizabeth, Victor’s single-minded drive leading to the Creature made me want a change in narrator. The Creature itself is pale like a corpse (or milk) and cross hatched from body parts in the Crimean War. He has the look of the Architect in Prometheus (2012). Sympathy turns to the Creature now that he takes up the narrative. He encounters the Blind Man played by David Bradley who voiced Geppeto in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. There themes of cruelty from society and the outside world, obsession, father and son, Victor and his father, and the Creature and Victor. Frankenstein is a brilliant adaptation full of Gothic visuals and story from del Toro!
Five+ Cylinders out of Five!
#Frankenstein, #GuillermoDelToro, #OscarIsaac, #JacobElordi, #MiaGoth, #ChristophWaltz, #FelixKammerer, #DavidBradley, #CharlesDance, #LarsMikkelsen, #NikolajLieKaas, #DavidBadley, #RalphIneson
