Guillermo del Toro (Dir.), “Frankenstein”, Netflix/Double Dare You/Demilo Films/Bluegrass Films, Mexico/United States, 2025.
Is it just me? Or
is Guillermo del Toro’s recent foray into the Gothic exactly the same as his
previous outing, just got up in another skin? I went and saw “Frankenstein”
at my local arthouse cinema and from very early on I had a creeping sense of
doom… and not in a good way. At about the halfway mark I was having flashbacks
to “Crimson Peak”, and I began to wonder why I was having such a strong recall
to that earlier film. Turns out, they’re the same movie.
Think about it: “Crimson
Peak” is a movie which, like the book Wuthering Heights, arrives in two
parts. There’s a first half with a distinct tone and flavour and then there’s a
second half in which the mood and set dressing all get switched. The first half
of “Crimson Peak” is all Henry James; the second bit is Emily Bronte. It
bothered me when I saw it because I felt that either half would have been fine
as a story in its own right, but each one suffered by being shoe-horned in with
its partner. Both narratives were hamstrung by being forbidden to breathe and reach
its own potential. It felt as though del Toro was trying to do too much.
With “Frankenstein”
it’s the same thing all over again, although here there’s actually very little
happening. The story has been broken into two halves – Victor’s point of view
and the Monster’s. Once again, the tone of each narrative is somewhat at odds
with its partner – Victor’s tale is sumptuous and colourful, full of gorgeous
interiors and all the hallmarks of urban civilization; the Monster’s story is darker
and full of animals, teeth and natural scenery. The framing device that
contains these two stories takes place aboard an icebound ship in the Arctic –
taking a cue from the novel: Victor is rescued by the crew; the Monster kills
its way on board before holing up with Victor, his quarry, in the captain’s
quarters; the two of them and the Captain have a pleasant cup of tea while they
talk, then they all go their separate ways, the Monster giving the ship a
useful nudge back out into open water as it leaves.
Does anyone else feel that this is a bit strange? I mean the Monster murders – horribly – at least six men on its way into the ship and then everyone settles down for a cosy chat. Excuse me? I understand that del Toro probably wanted to show off the creature’s awesome capabilities early on, and needed to begin the movie with a flashy action sequence, but it stands at odds with what follows. I wanted to start this film engaged, not scratching my head and wondering if I was missing something. Turns out, this movie is all about that feeling…
We start with Victor’s
side of the narrative. We enter a world of conspicuous consumption, endless
finery and barely suppressed generational cruelty. Victor grows up, enamored of
his mum, grudgingly accepting of his younger brother and gloweringly resentful
of his father. His side of things depicts him as an impulsive and headstrong
type, snatching opportunities and running with them as hard as he can, and
being scornful of those who cannot, or will not, keep up with him or let him do
as he pleases. He takes advantage of others and does what he likes. He doesn’t
come across as a very likeable individual.
And let’s be clear:
Victor Frankenstein is a real piece of shit. In the book though, he owns it.
Here, he never seems to be aware that he’s in the wrong, he never seems to have
the levels of self-awareness that allow him to feel shame, or guilt, or even a
shred of responsibility. He just blunders through a narrative that seems fore-ordained.
And here I think is the great weakness of this movie: it runs on rails. At no
point do we see the characters faced with choices; we never see them make
crucial choices which activate their destinies; they never display any
awareness that the tragedy befalling them is of their own making. It’s as if
these characters have no interior life; no ability to reflect or to feel
regret. They’re just a bunch of puppets.
Right at the end,
Victor speaks to his monster and says, “will you forgive me?”, but at no point
do we get the sense that he’s at all regretful of his past actions and the passes
to which they have led him. He might as well have been asking the creature to
hand him another comfy pillow. To put it simply, the absolution is in no way
earned, and yet, it’s the thing upon which the whole film is predicated. The Monster
says, “yeah, okay”, he leaves, and it’s all over. Very unsatisfying.
We glide past a
bunch of things during Victor’s narrative – the tenderness of his mother; the
cruelty of his father; the hidebound resistance of his teachers – but none of
it pays off. We are left to intuit that maybe Victor’s Oedipal hang-ups are the
root cause of his issues, but we are never shown any of it – it’s all
there, but it’s very hand-wavy; an afterthought. As if the wallpaper might clue
us in. The actors roll around the sets quite readily, buffeted by gallons of
expository dialogue, but none of them ever show us anything. It’s very
pretty, but utterly bloodless. The ingredients are all there, but the director
doesn’t do anything with them.
When Mia Goth shows
up as Elizabeth (after having cunningly swanned about as Victor’s mother in the
beginning) I thought “hello! Now we’ll get some romantic tension: a little
argy-bargy from the two brothers; a twist in the slowly unspooling narrative”;
but no, it falls completely by the wayside. Victor stares longingly; she jumps
the gun and says, “no way, Jose”, and then it’s over. Nothing to see here:
everyone just gets on with other things. A lot of time and effort seems to have
been spent dressing Ms. Goth up as a kind of insect, but nothing comes of it:
it seems arbitrary; capricious. In “Crimson Peak” Mia Wasikowska was
similarly tricked out as a bug, and it seemed there that she was supposed
be a moth, fleeing the darkness and trapped in a spidery web; here, I got
nothin’. I’m left scratching my head and thinking, what was the point?
We are told that lightning
rods must be pure silver or trouble will ensue; they are, and it doesn’t. We’re
quite deliberately shown one of them accidentally bending out of true; nothing
comes of it. There’s a whole thing about Christoph Waltz’s character having
syphilis and wanting to have his brain stuck inside the creature; doesn’t
happen, he gets horribly killed, and then nothing comes of that. By the
time I reached the halfway point, my mind was so full of bookmarked plot points
that I thought I’d have to break out a pen and notebook. Didn’t matter though:
none of it was crucial to the story. If the director had an intent for
all of this stuff, then it was news to me. Nothing signified; there was
no weight to anything.
The only thing that
I really enjoyed were the horrible confections that Victor slapped together to show
that he could reanimate a corpse. These were truly distressing in their impact,
and I had high hopes that the Creature’s ‘shocking reveal’ would follow suit
(didn’t happen). Along with the heart-stopping brutality of Victor’s benefactor
Harlander’s death, these were masterful moments in pulse-adjustment. Pity there
were so few of them. Del Toro seems well-versed in bringing his own horror; he
just seems unable to depict anybody else’s.
Then we shared a nice cup of tea with the ship’s captain and moved on to hear from the Monster.
First impressions
about the creature that Victor built: he wasn’t bad-looking. In the novel,
Victor is so intent on the process that he fails to take in his creation in an
aesthetic sense. After he steps back and takes a good long look, he realizes
that what he has just made is a hideous malformation, something not fit for
polite company. Here though (and this isn’t unique to this film; it’s become something
of a tradition in modern times) the actor playing the ‘hideous’ creature is a
buff, studly type, with a bit of latex or CGI to make him a little bit less-than-perfect.
An equivocal reading of this says that a good-looking actor helps allude to the
fact that – like the beast in “Beauty and the Beast” - the monster is “beautiful
on the inside”, but we’ve only ever been given surface readings of everything else
in this film up to this point, so why should we try to dig below the surface of
this particular issue? Anyway, the monster is hunky and good-looking, not
terrible at all. In fact, a short way into this movie I began to refer to him
as the “Disney Princess” since all of the little birdies and squirrels and deer
couldn’t wait to gather around him. I was fully expecting them to all break out
into song…
Speaking of the
bushland critters, let’s just pass over the fact that they were all horribly
portrayed. If there was a budget for CGI in this movie, I’m guessing only about
10% of it went towards making the animals seem at all real.
Anyway, our Disney
Princess encounters nasty brutish people out in the world and winds up, like the
Little Mermaid, hiding and wanting desperately to be where the people are.
Inevitably, he breaks into Victor’s glamorous world and breaks things before…
rescuing Elizabeth…? And helping her escape from her suffocating world?
Something like that. Anyway, she dies and it’s all Victor’s fault (nothing comes
of it), his brother dies (nothing comes of it) and nothing ever comes of any of
it. It’s the leitmotif of this film. A world without consequences…
And so, we end up
back onboard the ship and the captain winds up the session. Victor asks, can I
get a ‘you’re forgiven’? The monster nods, ‘I guess’, and then it’s all over,
with the monster giving the boat a shove by way of making up for horribly murdering
a goodly portion of the crew. We can watch the credits roll, safe in the
knowledge that nothing leads to anything, nothing has any meaning and that we’ve
just spent two hours watching nothing of value.
I’m sorry, but: no.
This isn’t Frankenstein. I don’t know what this is exactly, but
it ain’t that. I read beforehand about how this is one of del Toro’s favourite
books and how he’s always wanted to recreate it on the big screen, but
something went desperately wrong somewhere. This is a flat piece of cinema by
any standards. The writing is cursory and illogical; the direction is casual and
lacklustre, and the actors are all wooden. It looks good (except for the animals),
but it’s a hollow shell containing nothing except the withered husks of several
Disney films. I really feel that del Toro simply dusted off his script for “Crimson
Peak” and recreated its broad strokes in a different skin for the purposes
of this work. Even the water tower wherein the monster is brought to life, looks
exactly the same as the titular evil mansion in “Crimson Peak”, albeit
with a less gloomy paint job. If this is del Toro’s love letter to Mary Shelley’s
amazing book, then it’s clear he doesn’t really think that much of it at all…
Two Tentacled Horrors.
