Frankenstein    

Rating:

Never mind your Tik-Tok influencers and adolescent pop stars, the most culturally influential teenager of all time is surely Mary Shelley, who was barely as old as the century when, in 1816, she began writing Frankenstein.

There have been well over 200 screen interpretations since the first in 1910, and now the mighty Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has had a crack.

And very handsome it is, too, even if the lament of Frankenstein’s monster (Jacob Elordi) that his plight will never end, at times seems to apply to the movie itself. It lasts a whisker under two and a half hours.

Still, for Del Toro, the lavish reception at last night’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival will more than justify the movie’s reported £90 million budget, not to mention the 30 years he has spent yearning to bring the book, just like Shelley’s ‘modern-day Prometheus’, to life.

His film begins in 1857 in the Arctic, where a crew of exhausted Danish sailors are terrorised by a preternaturally strong creature in vaguely human form.

The brute’s real target, though, is a badly wounded fellow who, of course, turns out to be Dr Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). 

The mighty Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has had a crack at a screen interpretation of Frankenstein. And very handsome it is, too, even if the lament of Frankenstein’s monster (Jacob Elordi) that his plight will never end at times seems to apply to the movie itself

For Del Toro (pictured), the lavish reception at last night’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival will more than justify the movie’s reported £90 million budget, not to mention the 30 years he has spent yearning to bring the book, just like Shelley’s ‘modern-day Prometheus’, to life

His film begins in 1857 in the Arctic, where a crew of exhausted Danish sailors are terrorised by a preternaturally strong creature in vaguely human form. The brute’s real target, though, is a badly wounded fellow who, of course, turns out to be Dr Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac)

To explain this extraordinary to-do we are then whisked back in time to Victor’s boyhood tribulations at the hands of his tyrannical father Leopold (Charles Dance), a renowned surgeon determined that his first-born son should likewise have a career in medicine.

Whether Shelley intended it or not, Del Toro’s version of her story cleaves to the notion that problems in adulthood are sown by iffy parenting. The poet Philip Larkin, you’ll recall, expressed the same notion more succinctly.

Victor duly grows up to be a surgeon, demonstrating to astounded colleagues his experiment in creating human life by piecing together parts from different corpses and animating the hybrid body.

They are aghast, but soon he has a rich patron in arms manufacturer Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz). 

An elaborate lab is built, and while Del Toro hasn’t made a horror film so much as a dark fairy tale about fatherhood, there’s still a wonderfully gory montage showing Victor slicing up stiffs he’s retrieved from a battlefield, accompanied, with glorious dissonance, by jolly waltz music.

Eventually, Victor’s creation bursts excitingly into life, but before long the doctor starts to have reservations about what he has done. 

The film’s second act tells the subsequent story from the point of view of his ‘monster’, who, while holed up in a forest, not only acquires a kindly personality and a modesty about his genitals but also a mild Yorkshire accent. Which is most weird, it is hard to say

Whether Shelley intended it or not, Del Toro’s version of her story cleaves to the notion that problems in adulthood are sown by iffy parenting. The poet Philip Larkin, you’ll recall, expressed the same notion more succinctly

The film’s second act tells the subsequent story from the point of view of his ‘monster’, who, while holed up in a forest, not only acquires a kindly personality and a modesty about his genitals but also a mild Yorkshire accent. Which is most weird, it is hard to say.

Come to think of it, it’s also strange that Elordi, an actor dishy enough to have played the young Elvis Presley (in 2023’s Priscilla) should be cast as one of fiction’s best-known grotesques. 

 His good looks are by no means entirely obscured by all the prosthetic scars, but I don’t think they’re intended to be. Underneath it all, this monster is not really monstrous at all.

Nevertheless, Del Toro pays sustained homage to Shelley’s novel, which hasn’t always been apparent in the many other screen iterations. 

The great director also knows how to dish up a feast for the senses. With its sumptuous sets and costumes and rousing score, Frankenstein is splendid on both the eye and the ear.

Beyond all that, what it is, really, is a top-notch superhero movie.