Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is the cinematic equivalent of watching a child let loose in a toy shop: you can’t deny the glee, but you can question whether he actually needed all the toys. This is clearly his passion project, his gothic playground, his shrine to Mary Shelley. And while it’s undeniable that he adores the aesthetics (he probably stuffed his living room with most the props), perhaps one shouldn’t play so lovingly with one’s heroes. Sometimes devotion smothers invention.

The film is slavishly faithful to the book, at least at first, quoting Shelley verbatim like a student too nervous to paraphrase. But in its eagerness to cram the entire novel into two and a half dense hours, the film never gets the chance to breathe. The protagonists, played by Oscar Isaac as the mad scientist and Jacob Elordi as his revitalised creature, speak in solemn Victorian maxims that clang on screen like museum plaques. And that leads to a vast, creaking cliché, strangely devoid of original touch. We have the classic, as well as countless remakes… did we really need yet another version that has nothing to add?

Worse still, del Toro snips out one of the novel’s most vital beats: the creature’s murder of a child. Not for pacing, not for brevity, but seemingly out of reluctance to stain his beloved monster. While the trick worked with arguably all his previous works, the dedication to sympathise with the monster is, quite frankly, redundant in Frankenstein. Without that act of brutality, the creature loses his contradictions, his tragic duality. He becomes a simplistic hollow statue of sorrow, robbed of the layers Shelley carved into him.

So what we’re left with is just stuffed flesh: a lifeless, decomposed work, dead at birth. A Frankenstein film so interested in the aesthetics of thunderstorms and steampunk mechanics that, ironically, forgets to spark itself alive.