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If you want an adaptation to stay close to the source material, Frankenstein is for you.
If you want a brilliant central performance or two, Frankenstein is for you.
If you want to watch one of the best movies of the year, Frankenstein is for you.
Now, I can’t fully claim that Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation is a line-by-line transcription of Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, but I can say with confidence that it is far more faithful than most of its predecessors. That fidelity is evident from the monster’s design alone, which takes immense influence from illustrator Bernie Wrightson.
Jacob Elordi as the model for this design is a stroke of genius. He’s always been an electric, suave presence on-screen (particularly as Elvis in Priscilla a few years ago). But here, he is mostly stripped of his handsome features and his vocal strengths. For much of his performance, he is left with just one word, “Victor.” His physicality provides a towering, menacing, vengeful presence but ensures the character is not reduced to sheer horror.
Elordi’s Creature is the soul of the film. Where many adaptations stop at grotesquerie, del Toro and Elordi insist on his humanity. Their shared complexity restores what Shelley always intended: a man in search of his creator out of a desperation to live the human experience. And he runs the gamut with his performance, flipping from a menacing presence to being almost childlike in another. He is a being caught in the contradiction of being both unnatural and deeply human.
Del Toro, directs with the care of a craftsman and the warmth of a father. It’s the film he has always made. Cronos, Pan’s Labyrinth, Nightmare Alley, The Shape of Water have all been precursors to this moment. His reverence for the story is unmatched (which originates from Boris Karloff’s films, he said at the premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival).
And for as much as Elordi brings the Creature to life, so does Oscar Isaac opposite him as Victor Frankenstein. I can’t remember another adaptation that understands Victor’s world the same way as del Toro and Isaac do here.
Victor is reshaped as a man forged in the shadow and absence of his father, and unknowingly becomes the very man he hated. Victor’s obsession with creation is no mistake here, and neither is his abandonment of his creation. It’s an infinitely complex character, equally matched by the Creature.
Del Toro’s films are always technical marvels, so it goes without needing detail to describe the craftsmanship on display. It’s really the performances and core ideas that reclaim the story’s origins that make this one of the best films of the year.
