Guillermo del Toro writes and directs a passionate, moving adaptation of « Frankenstein » starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi.
“Frankenstein” has been a passion project of director Guillermo del Toro’s for a long time, but you don’t need to read about how he worked for more than a decade to get it off the ground to understand that. The passion drips from every frame of del Toro’s epic reimagining of a story that has been an indelible part of cinema history since James Whale’s one-two punch of “Frankenstein” and “The Bride of Frankenstein” in the 1930s.
The Netflix film, which premiered on Saturday at the Venice Film Festival, is “Frankenstein” writ large, “Frankenstein” as a glorious spectacle in which we can see the inspiration behind del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy,” “Crimson Peak,” “The Shape of Water” and many more. It’s a filmmaker returning to his roots at a time when he has the skills to make those roots grow into something huge and singular.
Del Toro’s movie pays tribute to Whale but finds its spark in Mary Shelley’s Gothic 1918 novel “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.” As film adaptations go, this is one of the truest to Shelley’s book, which is not to say that it’s truly faithful to anything but the titanic imagination of the filmmaker who had made a career out of twisting genre and finding heart in the monstrous.
His “Frankenstein” is a titanic piece of work, two and a half hours that bend Shelley’s framework to contain nearly everything we’ve loved about this story of the brilliant but foolhardy scientist and his fearsome creation. One of the remarkable things about “Frankenstein” as we know it is how little of the familiar iconography comes from Mary Shelley, who set her tale largely in an Arctic wasteland and never once revealed what Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s creature looked like or how the doctor brought life to a being cobbled together from corpses.
Del Toro uses the book as a storytelling model but adds familiar cinematic touches like the laboratory that uses lightning to animate the creature or the lurching hulk with a monosyllabic vocabulary.
