Guillermo del Toro is not the first filmmaker to tackle Frankenstein and its archetypal monster by declaring he would attempt a faithful adaptation of the original source, Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic novel. In 1994, in the wake of the success of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Kenneth Branagh attempted a similar restoration with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, starring himself as Victor Frankenstein, the arrogant 18th-century doctor who succeeds in bringing an assembly of human body parts to life. In Branagh’s movie, as in Shelley’s book, the Creature (Robert De Niro) is erudite and philosophical, but still monstrous; De Niro plays him as a pitiable, grossly scarred hunchback.
Del Toro, whose lavish new Frankenstein is in theaters now and on Netflix soon, has taken a very different approach. He raised eyebrows with the casting of 28-year-old Australian actor and certified tall drink of water Jacob Elordi in the role of the Creature. But, combined with an inspired approach to the Creature’s design, the gamble paid off. Elordi is by far the best thing about the movie.
Rather than attempting to disfigure Elordi’s beauty, del Toro and his art and makeup teams lean into it. Their Creature is sculptural and kind of beautiful, with defined musculature and smooth, marble-white skin lined with clean, curving seams. At first, when still in the care of Victor Frankenstein (a miscast Oscar Isaac), he is hairless and almost naked, and looks like a living statue. This choice works well within the period setting. Rather than presenting the Creature as the grotesque, misbegotten experiment of a madman, del Toro frames him as a true product of the Age of Enlightenment: the dream of a dangerously idealistic perfectionist.
It helps, of course, that Elordi is enormously tall. At 6 feet 5 inches, he’s almost as big in his stocking feet as Boris Karloff, who played the creature in James Whale’s iconic 1931 Frankenstein, in his platform shoes and full monster makeup. (Shelley’s novel describes the Creature as 8 feet tall.) Elordi is great at using his height emotionally to suggest the distance between him and other characters. In the hyperreal teen soap Euphoria and as Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, he looms in a dominant, magnetic, ambiguously threatening way.
In Frankenstein, he’s straightforwardly imposing when required — especially in some brutal action scenes which use the film vernacular of superhero, rather than horror, cinema. But he’s also touchingly remote, reaching down in hope to the tiny humans around him: first Isaac’s Frankenstein, then Mia Goth as Elizabeth (Frankenstein’s fiancee in the book; in this movie, it’s more complicated), and then David Bradley as a blind old man who takes the Creature in.
Over the course of the film, Elordi’s Creature gets his Goth on, growing long, lank hair and dressing in sweeping, ragged furs. He also evolves from the wordless innocent he is at creation into a sensitive, bruised sad boy, simmering with rage at his own existence. None of this really makes him any less hot. This suits del Toro, who adores a tragic love story about an abused creature redeemed by the love of a woman, and takes an almost Romeo & Juliet approach to the relationship between the Creature and Elizabeth. It’s occasionally preposterous, but Elordi carries the movie with subtlety and grace — much more so than Isaac, who strains too hard to match the grandiosity of del Toro’s visuals and storytelling, and ends up overacting.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein is gory in places, and extravagantly Gothic in its look, but in no sense is it a horror movie. In any case, Shelley’s novel was always closer to the origin of hard sci-fi or speculative fiction than horror, and del Toro’s script does ample if rather on-the-nose justice to its moral questioning. (At one point, someone actually says “You are the monster!” to Victor Frankenstein.) But del Toro is nothing if not sentimental, and he ultimately focuses his energy — and his actually quite extensive changes to Shelley’s plot — on amping up the romantic melodrama, creating a love-quadrangle between the Creature, Elizabeth, Victor, and Victor’s younger brother William (Felix Kammerer), who is Elizabeth’s betrothed in this version.
It’s all very sweeping. If it’s not quite as moving as the director wants it to be, it might be because Elordi’s lovely, soulful monster eclipses most of the human players with ease (with the exception of the fantastic Bradley). But maybe that’s an appropriate way to update Mary Shelley for the AI age. What if the new life we create in our hubris is just… better than us?
Frankenstein is now on limited release in theaters, and on Netflix on Nov. 7.
- Security Camera Installation – indoor/outdoor IP CCTV systems & video analytics
- Access Control Installation – key card, fob, biometric & cloud‑based door entry
- Business Security Systems – integrated alarms, surveillance & access control
- Structured Cabling Services – voice, data & fiber infrastructure for new or existing builds
- Video Monitoring Services – 24/7 remote surveillance and analytics monitoring
Author: 360 Technology Group
