When I was young, I was obsessed with Universal Monster movies. The James Whale Frankenstein films in particular: big Erlenmeyer flasks, coils crackling with electric energy, Boris Karloff clomping around in that squared-off makeup. It’s pulp tailored for young boys, and those images remain our cultural touchstones, from Halloween costumes to cereal boxes. There have been countless adaptations since, some I’ve loved (Larry Fessenden’s Depraved), but few have attempted a truly faithful rendering of Shelley’s novel. The closest I can recall is a forgotten TNT miniseries with Patrick Bergin and Randy Quaid, the first time I learned the book actually began in the Arctic wastes.
Guillermo del Toro seems genetically engineered to make a Frankenstein movie. After twenty-five years of promises, he’s finally delivered his passion project, and given his devotion to Gothic literature, he was always the filmmaker to treat Shelley’s text with proper reverence. To a great degree, he succeeds. His take on The Modern Prometheus is lavish and visually rich, paying homage to his beloved sources while staying largely faithful to the book. But over its lengthy runtime, the film becomes increasingly hampered by del Toro’s familiar thematic fixations—the ones he’s made his stock in trade throughout his career.
The plot follows the novel closely: it’s set in the 1800s, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) creates the Creature (a very tall Jacob Elordi) from dead body parts, and an Arctic framing device allows both to share their stories with a patient ship’s captain (Lars Mikkelsen). The key deviation is Elizabeth (Mia Goth), who here marries Victor’s brother (Felix Kammerer) rather than Victor himself, and bears an unsettling resemblance to their deceased mother.
It’s difficult to make a bad Frankenstein movie when you’re working directly from the novel. It’s a perfect book, and that so few filmmakers have attempted faithful adaptations is a tremendous waste. Del Toro comes closest while making something identifiably his own. The opening sequence, where the Creature wages a brutal attack on the trapped ship, combines period setting, primitive technology, and superhuman violence in a way that feels more Hellboy than his actual Hellboy films. He extends Victor’s childhood backstory to build sympathy and establish an Oedipal strain that constantly threatens to derail things. But when del Toro focuses on Shelley’s text, the result is an absorbing, richly Gothic portrayal of one of literature’s great tragedies.
Del Toro’s smartest move is amalgamating the novel’s structure and narrative spine with the aesthetic language of the Universal films. We get an increasingly wild-eyed Victor in full Georgian finery, zapping his stitched cadaver with bolts of electricity. When the Creature meets the Blind Man, the script merges the briefer encounter from the book with the deeper friendship from Bride of Frankenstein. The Creature’s design pays explicit homage to Bernie Wrightson’s comics artwork. For someone who loves seeing DNA strands of inspiration intertwine, this is catnip.
All of this makes Frankenstein largely enjoyable. It would be almost impossible for it not to be. This story is as elemental as the Bible by now. But del Toro struggles to get out of his own way, and it happens with increasing frequency as the film progresses. There are minor stumbles: a dead-end subplot involving Christoph Waltz as an arms dealer funding Victor’s experiments, some glaringly rough CGI that clashes with Dan Laustsen‘s gorgeous cinematography. The real problems center on Elizabeth.
She’s recast as a progressive reformer, staunchly anti-war and attracted to her future brother-in-law despite their conflicts. This works well enough, though the Oedipal undertones feel heavy-handed. (Victor constantly drinks milk. Subtle.) The wheels come off when Elizabeth encounters the Creature and develops a sudden, inexplicable attraction to him. This becomes the final act’s most damaging element. It’s not quite a killing blow (too much of what precedes del Toro’s lapse into familiar “sympathy for the monster” territory is too vibrant for that), but the film is beaten and bloodied by the time it crosses the finish line.
Those final moments will be what viewers remember, not the beautiful work that precedes them. Del Toro has spent his career making movies about outcasts and monsters worthy of love, and he can’t help himself here. In The Shape of Water, that impulse won him an Oscar. In Frankenstein, it’s the thing holding him back from making a masterpiece. The irony is thick: he’s created something that honors Shelley’s novel more faithfully than any film before it, only to be undone by his inability to let the text speak for itself.