1 of 5 | Jacob Elordi plays the creature in “Frankenstein,” in theaters now and on Netflix Nov. 7. Photo courtesy of Netflix
It should come as no surprise that Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water writer/director Guillermo del Toro empathizes with the creature in Frankenstein. His adaptation, in theaters now and on Netflix Nov. 7, is both faithful to the original Mary Shelley novel and distinctly his own.
The film opens in 1857, with the crew of a ship wedged in the ice discovering Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) on the surface. When they rescue him, the creature (Jacob Elordi) attacks the crew while looking for his maker.
The movie immediately establishes how strong the creature is, as he’s able to push the boat until it tips. Victor tells the ship’s captain his story thus far.
Two years prior, Victor demonstrated his ability to re-animate the dead with electricity at the Royal College of Medicine. This demonstration on only the upper half of a body is graphic, and the college considers it a parlor trick.
Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) is interested in personally funding Victor’s research though. While the first experiments don’t re-animate, the successful ones become jump scares.
Victor eventually has a breakthrough while bathing and steps into his lab naked. It’s interesting how this one-ups Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 shirtless Victor.
He assembles the body from battlefield victims and del Toro shows him manipulating physical parts on the set.
The first moment between Victor and the creature is touching. The more time they spend together, however, Victor increasingly treats him as a scientific experiment, not as a nurturing parent who just created life.
Shelley’s subtext was man trying to play God, or more specifically trying to play woman by giving birth. Thus, the horror that ensued was punishment for man overstepping bounds, or lacking the follow through to be responsible for the life created.
This lack of compassion is emphasized by del Toro. Victor grows frustrated that his experiment isn’t making progress, losing sight of the whole concept that he literally created a human being.
Most children are allowed 18 years to develop. Victor expects the creature to pick up where the brain and body parts he used left off, so he’s not just trying to create life, he’s trying to fast forward experience.
Victor is definitely not maternal, which isn’t necessarily a gendered quality, but his future sister-in-law, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) responds to the creature kindly.
Even though the creature is rejected by his creator, he does not perpetuate violence unprompted in this film. Boris Karloff’s creature killed because he did not know his own strength, but Elordi’s laments the violent nature of the world.
The creature witnesses natural violence between animals and egotistically motivated violence by humans. But, even though the creature himself is not violent, he ultimately has to defend himself against violent people.
In real life, Elordi is already 6-foot-5-inches, but the angles del Toro uses make him appear even larger. But, Elordi plays the creature as an innocent, not a beast.
While mostly faithful to the text, del Toro adds some interesting twists. The introduction of Harlander brings some new complications to the story.
The backstory given to Victor in the film also suggests Freudian themes relevant to Frankenstein. As a child, he was obsessed with his mother and jealous of his father for commanding her time.
Young Victor admired his mother’s ability to create life, but that also took her away from him when she died giving birth to his brother, William.
Goth plays Victor’s mother in the flashbacks too. Though the film does not explicitly connect Victor’s lust for his brother’s fiance to mommy issues, the dual roles says it all.
Frankenstein has been adapted since the earliest days of cinema and will continue to be long after this generation of filmmakers is gone. This rendition captures the story’s epic qualities with del Toro’s unique affinity for creatures at the forefront.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
