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Guillermo del Toro does nothing by half measures, and his Frankenstein—premiering here at the Venice Film Festival—is so visually ornate, so charged with supersized feelings, that it feels a bit like four and a half movies squeezed into one. That’s both a plus and a minus. This is a story split into two parts: The first is told from the point of view of Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac, a brilliant but arrogant scientist who builds a living man from the spare parts of various corpses, only to realize he can’t control the creature he’s created. In the second, the creature—played by Jacob Elordi, made up to look like an oversize god made of veined, moving marble—tells his part of the story. He never asked to be brought into the world, yet there he is, yearning to be a part of humanity but instead shunned and feared because of his monstrous size and strange, coarse behavior. The second half of Frankenstein is where the grand emotions start getting pumped in, and where the problems begin. It’s almost as if we can’t be trusted to have the correct feelings for this misunderstood creation—and so the movie orchestrates those feelings into being rather than teasing them out of us.
That’s a disappointment, because this is the kind of story Del Toro seems made to tell. Though he uses Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel as a framework, he allows the story to branch out into fanciful, inventive rivulets. In the first half, we learn about the cruelty of Victor’s physician father (played by an icily menacing Charles Dance), who tries to remake his young son (at this point played by Christian Convery) in his own image, punishing him cruelly when he fails. Victor lives for the love and care of his mother; he’s bereft when she dies in childbirth, but he also vows to conquer death. As a young man, he gets kicked out of medical school for trying to reanimate a half-corpse pieced together from the parts of two deceased humans. Luckily, a rich arms merchant…
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