Frankenstein

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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The maestro of melancholy, Guillermo del Toro, scores with his version of “Frankenstein.” The film has the good sense to keep the tone of the original novel and most of its original content, although dispensing with the presence of a female counterpart. 

The film is terrific for illustrating the heart and pain of the creature along with the mad egotism of the creator. The film is visually beautiful, resembling the very pages of Mary Shelley’s saturnine and subversive novel.

We are swept into the land of barren ice where the creature (wonderfully played by Jacob Elordi) intends to confront his maker Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) with a kind of karmic reckoning. The creature boards a ship, fighting for his emotional equilibrium. Day to day existence is unbearable for the man, who is physically inhuman yet very human with spirit and emotion. All the creature wants is a mate, a partner or someone to understand him, and the film brings this out wonderfully.

The creature is no monster mash of organs and grunts but a being of great sensitivity and sadness. All he wants is a way to cope. As such, this being is an existential man.

Victor Frankenstein is driven by ambition and ego, masquerading as scientific progress. He is a double of the creature, his face mangled by savage accident and happenstance brought on largely by megalomania. Like his creation, Victor is artificially composed. He has a prosthetic leg. Also like his creature, Victor yearns for a feminine partner, in this case, his very mother.

Because of the inclusion of these fine psychological details, the film is masterful.

Victor starts with the best of intentions. He is nearly destroyed as a child by the death of his mother and grows driven, yearning to triumph over death and Father Time. Combine this aspiration with physical fatherly abuse and behold the monster that is Victor.

Frankenstein Sr. is not secret in his sadism.

Victor gains in brilliance, meeting the wealthy and capricious Henrich (Christoph Waltz) who donates a castle laboratory.

Matters are complicated when Victor falls for his brother’s fiancé Elizabeth (Mia Goth) who is the inventor’s psychological twin. She is profoundly irreligious, adores beetles, and dresses like a bejeweled green dragonfly in human form.

Frankenstein constructs his creation mounting it on a huge table resembling a crucifix. Ecce Homo: here is the modern Prometheus, the new man, an electrical Jesus.

The creature is exquisitely hypersensitive and beautifully crafted as if composed from some saddened Italian or oriental marble. There is a child’s innocence in Elordi: a creature of great sweetness that craves love.

Victor is elated at first but then becomes depressed. He chains the creation, and the being now resembles the lake monster in “The Shape of Water” (2017) confined to subterranean spaces.

Victor becomes incensed by Ego. The great chase of vengeance and pain commences.

This is a visual Gothic chiller of the first order, of blood and velvet in an Orientalist palette, William Morris with a camera.

Aside from the striking melody of the design, the soul of the film lies with Jacob Elordi whose portrayal shines with delicacy and grace although he is guised in the shades of Halloween.

Through the strange music of Elordi’s portrayal, observing his expression of wonderment and his almost Asian way of moving through space as in Kabuki Theater, we know something of his unending restlessness and his intangible yearning. To see this childlike but ultimately moral being is to witness our universal pushes and pulls, our conflicts and the horror of the human.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com