Frankenstein

Some details I loved before going into the longest review ever: - The creature being designed to resemble anatomical venuses (anatomical adonis in his case) the same kind of doll that young Victor played with in the beginning of the movie - The creature cracking his neck so often because he has the vertabrae of a hanging victim - The creature having the memories of the men he is made of - The scene of Victor cutting and breaking the corpses’ body parts with his bare hands, and reassembling the muscles and tendons of a hand was sooooo sick, i love that we actually got to see the grit it takes to create such an abomination (said lovingly) - Victor’s red leather gloves? Need them - Victor drinking milk like the freak he is - Also love that they retconned the monster being vulnerable to fire, truly making him immortal and giving him no reprieve from existence. It is vampiric in a sense, and I rock with it - The creature being reanimated on a cross, the wound on his side, him being “the son” a lot of religious imagery - The scene in the forest where the creature feeds the deer berries :(( he is literally my son I love screen adaptations where you can 100% tell that the writer/director have read and understood the source material, but who put their own twist on it inspired by personal experience and/or taste. It is the perfect balance of respecting the initial story and making it your own. That being said, Victor Frankenstein is a fucking rockstar. I am in awe. I never thought I’d see a Frankenstein adaptation where Victor is actually cool. His wardrobe (his WARDROBE), his attitude problem, and the way he moves reminds me of countless rockstars from Ozzy Osbourne, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morisson, Slash, and maybe even a little bit of Jim Curry’s Frank’n’Furter, which is a full circle moment. There were handful of scenes where I could hear Crazy train or Back in black play in the back of my head because he was doing genuine rockstar shit in Victorian England. Him rallying up the anatomical theatre with his night-of-the-living-dead zombie-prototype and making grown men holler gods name in fear? Thats Shock Rock. Him crawling onto bed, shirtless, with his black leather pants on red satin sheets after he believed his experiment failed? I felt like I was watching The Dirt again. Again, I have to stress how caught off guard I was by this devil-may-care attitude because Victor is a total wet blanket in the book. I want to give Guillermo del Toro a kiss on the goddamn forehead for this (very much needed) character change. Victor is an asshole, yeah. Selfish, rude, Byronic (haha) but he is so full of Oscar Isaac’s charisma and flair that you can’t help to be entertained every minute he is on screen. And then he becomes a father. Or, he becomes his own father, because one of the changes Guillermo del Toro made to Mary Shelley’s text is that he gave Victor an absolute dogshit dad, and Victor inevitably becomes just like him. Personally, I eat up generational trauma in gothic fiction, and I think this is a change that Mary Shelley would approve of, considering her own relationship to her father. Again, it is entertaining to see Victor be so callous and rude with other men on his level, but to a newborn, fawning creature who doesn’t know any better; who sees Victor as his entire world? While I have never liked Victor in other adaptions (or the source material tbh) I have always had a soft spot for the creature. While I trusted Jacob Elordi to look the part, I was pleasantly surprised by how well he embodied the role. His range here is impressive. His feelings lie raw beneath the heavy-boned brow, you feel his awe at the world with a single gaze. It is just as visceral when you see the fear he holds for Victor when he is chained to the basement, and the humiliation he feels when Victor mocks him over and over. The cycle of abuse repeats. It starts with Victor, his father and his mother, and it festers and moves on to the monster, Victor and Elisabeth. Elisabeth is yet another pleasant change. Instead of being Victor’s step-sister-slash-cousin, she is now his younger brother’s fiancée, because being semi-related is not as alluring as infidelity. But she is much more than her relation to either man. Mia Goth’s Elisabeth is intellegent, nurturing, and has an interest in the morbid and sublime that goes beyond Victor’s own interest in the same matter. This is shown in her curiosity and affection for the creature, where Victor only had animosity to give. Not to be parasocial about a woman who has been dead for hundreds of years, but Elisabeth in this film acts and thinks in a way I think Mary Shelley would. I love that they actually adapted the third act of the book. So many movie adaptations ignore it and I dont know why, it is hands down the best part of the story. It genuinely floored me when I made it past Elisabeth’s death in the book and I learnt that it was Victor hunting the creature down and not the other way around. Another aspect of gothic fiction that I love is how it toys with the line between hatred and love. Yes, Victor might hunt his abomination down with rifles and sticks of dynamite, but isn’t that better than total apathy? They chase each other, hurt each other, but it beats being alone. This is probably the closest that the creature had felt of fatherly love from his maker in a long time. It was also cathartic to watch the creature finally take control and traumatize his father back, Victor fucking deserved it. I remember when I first saw the 1931 version and I couldn’t finish it because the thought of seeing Boris Karloff’s rendition of the creature be torn apart by hateful villagers and fire upset me too much. I’ve always emphasized (to a worrying degree tbh) with the monster in horror stories, but the creature holds a special place in my heart. It surprised me when Guillermo del Toro took the story to a place of forgiveness and closure. The ending is everything I wanted the creature to have. What else is there to say? The costumes, set designs and colors were stunning as always; I really respect his dedication to having everything made by hand in the age of cheap cgi and ai in movies. Guillermo del Toro has total understanding of what makes the gothic genre so beautiful, and I am grateful I got to watch this masterpiece in the big screen.