There's a degree to which you already know what you're getting from a Guillermo del Toro retelling of Frankenstein. Robustly storyboarded visual sense, coupled to expansive, expensive production design. A full-blooded commitment to the original's horror elements. Some sort of emotional undertow. After the recent experiments carried out on the Shelley text by Danny Boyle (on stage) and Bernard Rose (on the indie fringes), this is very much Frankenstein trad: a handsome period piece that opens with an Arctic prelude, proceeds to some variation of the usual fucking around in the lab, and concludes with a comprehensively bloody bout of finding out. Del Toro's script tweaks the basics to provide a closer fit with a moment of extreme technological arrogance, introducing a syphilitic German financier (Christoph Waltz) who stands for the myriad ways capital can compromise the processes of creation and discovery. (Some will be reminded of certain tech-bro overlords, keenly buying up and ripping the lid off Pandora's box; cinephiles of this filmmaker's run-ins with Harvey Weinstein during the making of 1997's Mimic.) Mostly, though, the new film is Frankenstein as you've always had it in your head, albeit newly enlarged via palladian windows, practical prosthetic effects and everything else streamer money can buy.
The positive is that makes this the first of Netflix's awards-season contenders - after the unpersuasive Steve and the underwhelming A House of Dynamite - to deliver more or less what we were expecting when the project was announced. The flipside is that this Frankenstein lacks any real element of surprise, anything we weren't expecting. (It's somewhat algorithmic in its choices: if you've enjoyed del Toro's other Netflix productions, chances are you'll enjoy this too.) Frankenstein '25 has both the look and air and the flaws and virtues of a long-time pet project. By all reports, del Toro was thinking of filming this story in the wake of his international breakthrough Cronos some three decades ago, and he's visibly spent the years since tinkering with and adding to it, if the movie's GdT-designed weaponry, coffins and scientific hardware (generators in Netflix red) are reliable indicators. The results prove greatly more considered than Ken Branagh's pell-mell Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, configured for mindless multiplex consumption around the time of Cronos; as a production, this Frankenstein has been layered up like the latex uglifying Jacob Elordi's Creature. At fully two and a half hours, it's one of the more complete Frankensteins of our times - and makes the Boyle/Rose deviations seem like so much revisionism. Yet each successive script pass and departmental confab has only served to put extra skeins of comforting artifice between the film and the elemental Shelley was writing about; there's finally more texture than there is terror or thrills.
Del Toro's USP is that this is actually a sins-of-the-fathers story: Oscar Isaac's kohl-eyed Victor, rockstar scientist, is seen to visit on his creation the same cool indifference that Frankenstein Sr. (Charles Dance, wielded much as Tim Burton did Christopher Lee in the actor's final films) showed Victor as a boy. (The icy wastes of the wraparound story are really a masculine state of mind, as distinct from the matrilinear warmth of del Toro's native South America.) What this set-up yields, however, is lingering variations on scenes Frankenstein scholars will have seen many times before; it's the same story, elegantly redressed and reshuffled. The actors are generally fine, but you sometimes catch them struggling to extricate themselves from the overarching design. Though she's central to a late beauty-and-the-beast sequence, Mia Goth's Elizabeth is less memorable than one of the character's jade dresses; the movie's signature scene has Victor's brother William (Felix Kammerer) urge partygoers to toss handfuls of petals in the air to create a more striking effect. (Even the characters become set dressers.) This Victor is meant to be feckless and posturing, a fly-by-night success and personal failure, so the role doesn't much call for Isaac's soulfulness. Elordi - confirmed here as the real deal: an It Boy with legit screen smarts - succeeds in delineating the seven ages of Monster, even if he most potently registers when matters get pulpier: seeing off a pack of wolves with his bare hands, and tearing the jaw off one of his human pursuers. It'd work best as an introductory adaptation - My First Frankenstein? - for young adults: a good story, in the hands of a proven storyteller. My eyeballs were happy enough, which I can't say about every Netflix release this season. I just wish my pulse had been given cause to race a little more.
Frankenstein is now playing in selected cinemas; it streams on Netflix from November 7.
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