Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is Gothic horror rendered in the grandest strokes.
The expansive, baroque settings are grandeur incarnate, with grandiose performances pitched to fill every pixel of the Grand Guignol frame that the scarlet, grey and gloomy green backdrops do not.
Where Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” was a younger filmmaker’s homage to one of the cornerstones of horror, del Toro’s take on Mary Shelley’s horror epic is a mature master’s contemplative, considered appreciation of a work that still has something to say to humanity two hundred years after it was published.
“Only Monsters Play God” is added to his film’s full title. That hints at the opera without song he’s made out of it, profound and sentimental and smart enough to recognize no modern interpretation of a scientist absorbed with humanity’s obsession with longer and longer life would be satisfying without a Byronic fatalism the Oscar winning director is old enough to understand.
Eternal life denies “death, the one remedy to all pain.”
Oscar Isaac is our wild-haired genius, raised to pursue science and be heedless of most anything else by his commanding, demanding and unsentimental Swiss man-of-science father, Baron Frankenstein (Charles Dance).
But young Victor’s motivation crossed into mania the night he say his mother bleed out in childbirth. His obsession with ending death has him experimenting and shocking the Edinburgh university where he teaches, and his ranting, theatrical defense of his “I would have command over the forces of life and DEATH” Jeremiad gets him fired.
But an onlooker at his faculty inquisition is his salvation. Harlander (Christoph Waltz) is there to bring him news of his brother, William (Felix Kammerer). He’s engaged to marry Harlander’s niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth). And he’s heard of Victor Frankenstein’s “mad” experiments and wants to underwrite them.
As the story is framed within a Danish polar expedition’s encounter with a towering, cowled “monster” whom they cannot kill, with battered and bloodied Victor there to confess when the captain (Lars Mikkelsen) asks “What manner of devil made him?” we know how this turned out.
That’s the beauty of this retelling of a timeworn tale. We know the plot, the characters, the themes and the subtexts. Writer-director del Toro introduces just enough novelty and an unexpected turn or two — one must leave narrative breathing room for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s just-as-anticipated “The Bride” of Frankenstein film next spring — to make the story “new.”
Our monster (Jacob Elordi, who first gained fame in “The Kissing Booth” and broke out in “Euphoria”) isn’t mute. He talks. “VICTOR” he shouts, before finding a shortcut to learning a philosopher’s vocabulary and mindset.
There are no villagers with pitchforks. Danish sailors will have to do. Victor’s great love here is (somewhat) unrequited, his passion for his brother’s intended. But in the best Mel Brooks tradition, we see the la-BOR-a-tory designed and installed in an abandoned “public works” (water pumping) tower left unfinished by the many wars of 19th century Europe.
And what do wars provide in plentitude? Fresh corpses to dissect, dismember and piece together for “galvanic” (electrical) reanimation, the doctor is told by his arms-dealing sponsor Harlander.
The casting could not be better. Isaac devours the screen with his rages and touches with his late-act epiphanies. Elordi, hired to give Alexander Skarsgaard a break from famous horror roles, brings a soulful turn to our cursed “monster.” Goth’s Euro-accent is never unsteady enough to deny the fact that as a horror icon (“Pearl,””X,” “Suspiria”) she belongs here more than most anybody else.
Waltz’s casting pretty much guarantees that Harlander has an “angle” he’s playing.
Mikkelsen, brother of Mads, brings gravitas and a hint of megalomania to the captain who hears both sides of this tale while trapped in a sailing ship in the polar ice.
And Dance, draped in a cape big enough to hold every actor who ever played “The Phantom of the Opera” all at once, is simply magnificent — vulpine malevolence incarnate and a mean man with a mission, to see that his science is served and continued by his oldest son.
I wasn’t crazy about the hoary “Let me tell you my story” framing device. Having two characters launch the flashbacks is just cumbersome. The turns towards sentiment are undermotivated, and even at two and a half hours in running time, the shifts in tone and point of view play as abrupt.
And any thriller that leans on CGI elk and wolves has cut corners in ways that can take you straight out of the movie, if only for a scene or three.
But “Frankenstein” is beautiful to look at and thoughtful enough to make one ponder its two hundred year old themes and warnings anew.
And if young Mr. Eggers and Ari Aster (“Hereditary”) figure the world of smart horror is their oyster, the Mexican master del Toro reminds us that the smart money — even a Netflix blank check — is always bet on him.
Rating: R, graphic bloody violence, nudity
Cast:: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen and Charles Dance
Credits: Scripted and directed by Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by Mary Shelley. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:32
