Directed By Guillermo Del Toro

Starring – Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz

The Plot – A gothic adapting of Mary Shelley’s classic tale of Victor Frankenstein (Isaac), a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature (Elordi) to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.

Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images.

Frankenstein | Guillermo del Toro | Official Trailer | Netflix

POSITIVES

Considering that Del Toro has been empathizing with the tragic underlining of his man-made monsters for nearly the entirety of his prestigious career, it feels like a no-brainer that the story of Frankenstein would serve as his ambitious dream project, and with this newest adaptation on the familiar story being the most creatively accurate to Mary Shelley’s original novel, this feels like the quintessential installment that will inevitably gravitate audiences of a new generation to many of its thought-provoking themes and poignant commentary, which still ring as true today as they did during the 19th century. As always, this is a story about the pursuit of knowledge, and even nature versus nurture, but this time around there seems a much firmer implementation towards the curse of creationism that takes precedent over the dynamic of Victor and his monster, with the sins of the former’s own abusive father coming full circle towards enacting a punishing imprisonment towards the manufactured son of his own. This allows each of these characters to casually shift before our very eyes, with the creature becoming far more human and insightful on his journey outside of the laboratory, while condemning Victor to feel all the more monstrously indiscernible and unforgiving, in his race against the clock towards seeking a cure for mortality, cementing a fearlessness to Del Toro’s approach that isn’t afraid to tap into the isolation aspects of their respective characters, which should make them uniquely similar in a world that simultaneously casts each of them out, but instead drives a dividing wedge between them towards destroying one another. Del Toro’s best aspects of his mesmerizing direction are ultimately paid to his reveling of the morbidly macabre and grotesquely gruesome ingredients that stir so palpably in the imagery and atmosphere that make up his engagement, leading to one of the most viscerally brutal experiences with the embracing of violence that not only earns every inch of the intended R-rating, but also is used to articulate a superhuman strength for this version of the creature that is unlike any other. Even for a horror hound like me, Del Toro’s abruptly penetrating brand of high stakes physicality elicited no shortage of winces and shrieks that weighed vulnerably on my conscience, particularly with a firm combination of practical and computer generated effects towards limbs, that believably and seamlessly convey the full extensive force of bodily trauma, at their absolute merciless, producing top notch gore in the scalped and lingering limbs of its victims, which feel like the magnitude of vengeance for a creature constantly on the defensive of such a cruel and unforgiving world void of empathy and acceptance. The story does admittedly have some flaws with the experimental deviation of its structure, which I will get to later, but does have a way of taking audiences on an epic journey with its characters, all the while unraveling the extent of its aforementioned themes during heartbreaking moments that surprisingly had me fighting back tears. What’s especially admirable is the extensive dedication paid not only to the urgency of Victor’s self-imposed destiny as a narcissist scientist with a God complex, but also the advantageous first-hand perspective of The Creature living among society, which effortlessly fleshes out the best and worst among humanity, and while the film nearly clocks in at a two-and-a-half hour runtime, complete with individualized arcs that indulgently take their time to poetically render, I never found myself bored or even momentarily tested in the extent of the engagement, as a result of the opportunity to live within A tremendously illustrated world with limitless detail in every avenue of its incredible production. When I say that this film has the awards to clean up all of the technical categories at the upcoming Oscar’s, I say so because everything from the elaborate set designs, to the grandeur of costumes, to even entrancingly immaculate lighting schemes, bares a stunning influence to the depth assembled within this established world, and while Del Toro has always been a master at marrying grandly gothic architecture with transfixingly penetrating color, it feels all the more moodily epic in the confines of so many dominant locations attaining a three-dimensional tangibility to the audience, especially when commanded by longtime Del Toro collaborator, Dan Laustsen, surveilling us smoothly in the documentation of their many elaborate features. Similar to his work on “The Shape of Water”, Laustsen artistically elicits a waist level captivity that allows the camera to steer patiently across its many canvas textures, saving its grandest moments for the times a wide angle lens captures the immensity of the architecture, and while the stylistic flare is easily in Laustsen wheelhouse for comfort and capability, it’s his unmitigated focus towards the eyes of Elordi’s Creature that effectively taps into the empathetic windows of this tortured soul, allowing the audience the accessibility to see him emotionally in ways that the human characters never allow themselves to. This feels like a great time to transcend over to the performances, in which everyone assembled for this heavyweight ensemble deliver something vitally unique to the movie’s foundation. Oscar Issac delivers brilliantly towards another captivating performance, infusing Victor with an insatiable hunger for greed, in ways that often result in fiery intense long-winded diatribes conveying the emotional instability and insecurity against anyone who challenges him mentally. Likewise, Mia Goth’s subdued range breathes a heartfelt compassion into the vitality of the proceedings, taking many of these tender scenes miles with the kind of appeasing affection from a character who sees and appreciates the surrounding beauty in the world, and leaving a lasting impact on a film, despite the minimizing of her usage paling tragically in comparison to her male co-stars. Even Jacob Elordi’s disappearing transformation into the iconic creature garners an engrossing turn full of profoundly poignant sentiment, particularly within the earnest sorrow captured in bold ocular and distorted facial registries, that draw you to the rage and despair of the character’s trauma, all without compromising the imposing magnitude of the actor’s immense stature, which don’t require any kind of clever camera tricks to sell him as the force of nature that the movie needs him to be. Elordi’s physicality towards bodily contortion and devastation truly convey the internalized struggle persisting from within in, allowing him the limitless freedom to explore never before seen expressive avenues of depravity with the character, as a prisoner to a life that he constantly opens himself up vulnerably to explore.

NEGATIVES

In terms of the movie’s biggest problem, I could’ve done without the unique approach of its sectional structure pertaining to a different character with each shift, which seems to be all of the rage with so many movies attempting such a framing device with very little justification for doing so. To be fair, I can understand that Del Toro’s intention here was to equally flesh out and value of Victor and The Creature’s dreaded dispositions in facing a similar stationary in life, but I felt that it frequently robbed the movie of its maintained momentum, especially once the movie’s pacing starts to feel the wear and tear of the story entering its third hour of storytelling, resulting in a bloated emphasis during its third act, especially when the film could’ve ended on any of its three endings. For my money, if the film would’ve been told in a traditional narrative playing out in real time, then it wouldn’t of involved the clunkiness and disbelief of the audience forced to believe that Victor and The Creature are telling these long-winded stories to these complete and total strangers, for no reason other than the advantageous knowledge of the audience, all the while maintaining a bit of the vulnerability factor in the confrontations of their conflicts, which we know they will inevitably survive because they’re narrating the stories that are being shown to us. In addition to an undesired framing device, the film’s only other problem pertained to some sloppy audio deposits in post production, during the opening act, which conveyed noticeably enhanced dialogue, whenever a character’s mouth is either obscured out of frame, or their lips are all together not moving. With the magnitude of the production practically firing on all cylinders, it’s a bit surprising that the audio is a culprit for imperfection, but I can imagine the acoustics in these immense locations probably made it difficult to coherently pick up on microphone. However, it just made me wish that more time was taken towards smoothing them out all the more seamlessly, in order to avoid distraction, especially for a sound stickler like me, who realizes these things immediately when they happen.

OVERALL
“Frankenstein” is a Gothically gruesome triumph for Guillermo Del Toro, whose immaculate direction and near perfect correspondence of production, crafts an impressively ferocious adaptation of the Mary Shelley material, even at the demand of a two-and-a-half hour runtime driven by an unnecessarily convoluted framing device driving its storytelling. With an immaculate scope breeding beauty in the morbidity and macabre of its brutal bodily horror, as well as career-best turns from Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, and an especially disappearing Jacob Elordi, Del Toro injects new life to an aging body of a franchise, in turn realizing his dream project with the kind of driving passion steered by one of the industry’s most captivating filmmakers

My Grade: 8.9 or A-