Frankenstein, or, Merciless Life

At the start of the screening of Frankenstein that I watched, at Netflix’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, there was a short clip in which Guillermo del Toro explained two things: that he’d been wanting to make this movie almost his entire life, since seeing the Universal Frankenstein and being captivated by Boris Karloff; and that the significance of the story changed for him after becoming a father.

It was nice to get a personal introduction from the writer and director, but also pretty much unnecessary, since those two things are inescapable while watching the movie.

I don’t think I’d call this del Toro’s best movie, since Pan’s Labyrinth exists, but it certainly feels like the most Guillermo del Toro of any Guillermo del Toro movie I’ve seen. It is two and a half hours of him indulging in all of his favorite things: brilliant and vivid gothic horror with fantastic set and costume design, like Crimson Peak. Gruesome body horror combined with dark fantasy, like Pan’s Labyrinth. Dark laboratories and over-the-top monster action, like Hellboy, and all of his personal favorites that inspired him to want to work on Hellboy.

As in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, I loved seeing moments where a filmmaker is embracing their love of B movies, monster movies, and schlock horror, mashing them together into a combination of highbrow and lowbrow. Frankenstein has several scenes, usually involving Victor’s demonstrations of bringing full or partial cadavers back to horrific life, that combine Victorian gothic horror aesthetics with 50s sci-fi movie tech, all filmed with a kind of “gotta show the people what they want!” glee.

But I don’t want to give the impression that these are moments of indulgence in what’s otherwise a straight take on the original book, either. Frankenstein feels as if every single person involved knew exactly what kind of movie they were trying to make, and everyone was on board. It’s never camp, but it is happily overwrought melodrama.

It’s been many years since I read the book, and I’ve almost entirely forgotten the details, but I remember just enough to be able to recognize where and how del Toro’s adaptation departs from it.

The character of Elizabeth, played by Mia Goth, is Victor Frankenstein’s soon-to-be sister in law, who he develops a secondary obsession over, adding to his existing one about cheating death. I had so little memory of her character in any other version of the story1 that I had to check to verify that she was even in the original story.

She’s given so much more personality in this version that I wondered whether del Toro had inserted her as a surrogate for Mary Shelley herself, an assertion that women do belong in horror stories, as more than just victims or tokens for the other characters to manipulate. Here, she’s not really a love interest for Victor Frankenstein — after a genuinely charming couple of introductory scenes where you see their relationship start — but as a foil and counterpart. Whereas he’s obsessed with death, she’s fascinated by life.

And of course, she represents everything Victor loved about his mother, before she died and left him with a cold, demanding father and an obsession with controlling what can’t be controlled. Even if del Toro hadn’t prefaced the movie by explaining that it’s about fathers, sons, seeing yourself transforming into your parent, and reflecting on all the things you feel you did wrong as a parent, it’s abundantly clear in a movie that has no hesitation in telling you exactly what it’s about. At one point, a character tells Victor directly, “You’re the monster.”

But I don’t see it at all as a case of being too on-the-nose, but instead a way to underscore everything that this adaptation is showing you. It’s not the statement, but the period at the end of the statement. And the directness is frequently pretty powerful. At one point, Victor tries to justify his cruelty to the creature by saying “it doesn’t know the difference,” to which Elizabeth responds simply, “but you do.”

The movie states that its design of the creature is largely inspired by Bernie Wrightson’s version. You can definitely see it, in particular the way it looks like the creation of someone with an obsessive attention to detail in anatomical studies. I was struck by how much it resembled the modern Prometheus: specifically, the alien from the beginning of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. But it’s less cadaverous than Wrightson’s version, and more traditionally handsome. Not just an unavoidable side effect of casting Jacob Elordi, but a deliberate choice to make it read less like an abomination, and more like a person who doesn’t understand why they’ve been brought to life.

Which is another theme that Frankenstein layers on top of the existing ones. There’s quite a bit of horrific imagery in this movie, but its real horrors are of the existential variety. The greatest strength of this adaptation is how it presents all of our lives as both a blessing and a curse.

The more obvious takes on Frankenstein, especially the first Universal one, interpret it as being about the horror of bringing back the dead, and the hubris of man trying to either outdo or undo the work of God. Just the concept of an undead creature shambling around is supposed to be horrific enough.

This version gives Victor surprisingly little push-back for wanting to reanimate corpses. There’s one scene where it’s regarded as blasphemous or heretical, but that aspect of it isn’t given a lot of screen time or attention; the main characters seem to be more concerned that he’s too showy about it. In a world of public executions, frequent wars that leave thousands of dead on battlefields, and dissections of corpses in large auditoriums are pretty common, the idea itself doesn’t seem more beyond the pale than any of the other attempts of science and medicine to figure out how life works.

There seems to be little room for the spiritual. In fact, we see Victor’s father stress that anatomical studies have no room for questions of the soul or spirit. And in that context — along with the change of Victor’s mother dying in childbirth — the idea of bringing life to dead tissue isn’t treated as all that more horrific or unholy than the more traditional way we bring new life into the world.

So del Toro’s adaptation forces us to confront something more deeply unsettling: none of us really knows why we’re here. And yet many of us just keep bringing more people into the world who don’t have any more capacity for understanding why they’re here.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to mention that this version of the creature is super powerful, since we see multiple demonstrations of it early in the movie. He hasn’t just been brought to life; he’s been cursed with un-death. At one point, he describes himself as waking up once again to “merciless life,” another of those on-the-nose phrases that perfectly encapsulates every idea the movie is conveying.

It’s a shame I could never in good conscience describe a movie as “sumptuous” or “sensual,” since this version of Frankenstein succeeds on both counts. It really is gorgeous and masterfully done. But I think its greatest strength is how it simultaneously celebrates both the original story and the thematically-shallower adaptations of it. It invites jaded audiences to reconsider exactly why the original is horrifying, and all the implications of “It’s alive!”

1
Apart from Madeline Kahn’s in Young Frankenstein, of course ↩︎

1 Apart from Madeline Kahn’s in Young Frankenstein, of course