The first movie of Frankenstein was made in 1910, and the tale of a mad scientist trying to create a living being on his own simply won’t go away. Now it’s been filmed by Guillermo del Toro, who was raised on American horror films of the 1930s.
The director clearly loves the story and understands it better than most.
Frankenstein comes from the novel by Mary Shelley. She was married to the famed English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her parents were both philosophers and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft was an early feminist — maybe a reason that Shelley’s novel is about an overreaching man. Shelley had talked with her husband and others about gothic novels – stories of terror, dread, the supernatural – and in 1818, she wrote this one.
Her group were also interested in the question of God, and they were really interested in how to wrest power from any deity that controlled the lives of human beings. Her book shows the monster ultimately confronting his creator, Victor Frankenstein, on the profound question of what responsibility a creator has to the being it creates.
Guillermo del Toro opens his exceptional film on a ship trapped in the ice somewhere on the way to the North Pole. The captain rescues Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) from the ice and Frankenstein tells the captain his story. As both visual image and metaphor it’s a great start – the sight of being locked in and unable to break free, which is exactly where Victor Frankenstein and his creature stand with each other.
As a boy, Victor lives mostly with his mother in a dark, cavernous castle, but they have fun together. When Victor’s tyrannical father shows up, he pounds anatomy lessons into his son and whips his face if he gives a wrong answer.
And then the mother dies. You can let your inner psychiatrist ponder how these circumstances give rise to a character who wants to re-animate the dead.
When the adult Frankenstein defends his work to a large medical audience, he’s attacked for blasphemy:
"God gives life, and God takes it," one critic tells him.
But Victor responds: "Perhaps God is inept."
Filmmaker Del Toro recognizes that Shelley’s story goes well beyond a monster lurching across the scenery. The movie is a mix of tenderness, even humor, as well as violence, perverse ambition and fear, embodied in imagery that does not let you relax.
Even in the sweetest moments – as when the monster (Jacob Elordi) moves in with a blind man and learns to read, you know it can’t last — that human society cannot accept a monster, even of its own making.
What the monster finally reads is the long poem Paradise Lost by John Milton, which begins with a rebellion in heaven against God, and is central to what Shelley and del Toro are thinking.
Victor walks through dank tunnels and dark, cramped city streets, strewn with refuse and sometimes soaked with blood. After a battle, he hunts for body parts on snowy fields strewn with carnage.
The movie is plenty gory, yet Victor is matter-of-fact as he saws a leg from a body in his lab. And later, he shows himself a harsh creator who chains his creation and beats him.
But like the best monster stories, del Toro’s Frankenstein has deep sympathy for the creature, who becomes friends with that blind man in the forest cabin. The man feeds him and talks softly; the monster shows a gentle, caring side. He wants to learn who he is and where he comes from – he searches for the meaning of his life.
There’s something deeply fine about this being’s character that makes us wonder just what is a monster – compared to the violence and inhumanity of most of the human beings he encounters.
