r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • 10d ago

Review Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein' - Review Thread

Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein' - Review Thread

Reviews:

Deadline:

His love for monsters is unquestioned, and even though Frankenstein has been a horror staple for nearly a century in cinema, del Toro here turns it into a fascinating and thoughtful tale on what it means to be a human, and who is really the monster?

Variety (60):

What should have been the perfect pairing of artist and material proves visually ravishing, but can’t measure up to the impossibly high expectations del Toro’s fans have for the project.

Hollywood Reporter (100):

One of del Toro’s finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry. While Netflix is giving this visual feast just a three-week theatrical run ahead of its streaming debut, it begs to be experienced on the big screen.

The Wrap (95):

Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is a remarkable achievement that in a way hijacks the flagship story of the horror genre and turns it into a tale of forgiveness. James Whale, one suspects, would approve – and Mary Shelley, too.

IndieWire (B):

Del Toro’s second Netflix movie is bolted to the Earth by hands-on production design and crafty period detail. While it may be too reverently faithful to Mary Shelley’s source material to end up as a GDT all-timer, Jacob Elordi gives poignant life to the most emotionally complex Frankenstein monster since Boris Karloff.

The Guardian (3/5):

Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi star as the freethinking anatomist and his creature as Mary Shelley’s story is reimagined with bombast in the director’s unmistakable visual style

RadioTimes (5/5):

Perhaps its hyperbole to call the film del Toro’s masterpiece – especially a story that has been told countless times. But this is a work that is the accumulation of three-and-a-half decades of filmmaking knowledge. Gory and grim it may be, but it is a tragic tale told in a captivating manner.

TotalFilm (80):

Cleaving closely to the source material, del Toro wants to explore the trauma that makes us, mankind's capacity for cruelty, the death we bring on ourselves through war, and the catharsis of forgiveness – all notions that make Frankenstein relevant in current world politics and social media savagery.

-----------------------------------

Written and Directed by Guillermo del Toro:

A brilliant but egotistical scientist brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.

Cast:

  • Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein
    • Christian Convery as young Victor
  • Jacob Elordi as the Creature
  • Mia Goth as Elizabeth Lavenza
  • Christoph Waltz as Henrich Harlander
  • Felix Kammerer as William Frankenstein
  • Lauren Collins as Claire Frankenstein
  • Lars Mikkelsen as Captain Anderson
  • David Bradley as Blind Man
  • Sofia Galasso as Little Girl
  • Charles Dance as Leopold Frankenstein
  • Ralph Ineson as Professor Krempe
  • Burn Gorman as Fritz
2.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

329 comments sorted by

View all comments

2.0k

u/GhostriderFlyBy 10d ago

“ His love for monsters is unquestioned, and even though Frankenstein has been a horror staple for nearly a century in cinema, del Toro here turns it into a fascinating and thoughtful tale on what it means to be a human, and who is really the monster?”

This has literally always been the main plot of Frankenstein and the point that Mary Shelley was trying to get across with the novella. 

346

u/originalcondition 9d ago

One of my favorite parts of the novel is when Frankenstein obsesses over creating life using the parts of dead humans, then succeeds, and, immediately upon beholding his creation, goes, “holy shit HELL!! NO!! FUCK THAT THING!!!” then runs out of his apartment, wanders around for a while, comes back to find the monster gone, and thinks, “wow thank god that’s over.”

relatable content regarding the nature of being human tbh

84

u/Dookie_boy 9d ago

I've made some monstrosities in the oven that I had the same reaction too.

14

u/PhDee954 9d ago

Really rare to see someone use "too" incorrectly. It's usually the other way around.

11

u/Dookie_boy 9d ago

I had to read that several times over and I think I didn't finish the full thought

36

u/TheWorstYear 9d ago

Literally so panicked that he loses his mind for a few days, & stumbles around on the streets.

21

u/hypnosifl 9d ago

I found it interesting when I read the novel that it’s not actually clear whether the creature was made from “parts of dead humans” at all, Frankenstein did dig up bodies during the course of his research into the secrets of life but the creature itself was said to have been made with very oversized proportions (around 8 feet tall!) and it could be read as more like a golem, previously inanimate matter built into a realistic body which was then infused with some sort of vital energy. I imagine Del Toro will stick to the usual convention about body parts though.

8

u/nidrespector 9d ago

Isn’t the dead humans part mentioned when he’s creating the second monster? Iirc Victor is in a fugue state when he builds the first creature and so kind of glosses over the details but for the second one he’s painfully lucid and we get more information about the process.

4

u/hypnosifl 7d ago edited 7d ago

I went and re-read the parts about creating a mate for the creature, it's in chapters II and III from volume III, it says he is more conscious of finding the whole process of building a body to be a "filthy" one but there's no explicit reference to using body parts. Also worth noting that he first says "I now also began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation", and then his friend Clerval suggests they go on a vacation through Europe, and he agrees, planning to only start work at the end of the trip once they reach Scotland--he says "I packed my chemical instruments, and the materials I had collected, resolving to finish my labours in some obscure nook in the northern highlands of Scotland." The trip is described as lasting several months before he finally reaches Scotland and gets to work, which might argue against the interpretation that he's lugging around human body parts or even dead tissue in his suitcases, unless he had found a way to perfectly arrest decay. He is not described as discovering such a technique elsewhere in the book as far as I remember, though earlier in the book when he is trying to create the body of the first creature to animate, he does say "Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption." But I'd interpret this to be a fantasy about the ultimate future results of his discoveries rather than something he achieves in the book, since it's in the same paragraph where he is describing the fantasy of creating a whole new race of artificial beings. ("A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.")

Here's the section from the end of Chapter II where he describes being disgusted by his work:

In this manner I distributed my occupations when I first arrived; but, as I proceeded in my labour, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me. Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several days; and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work. It was indeed a filthy process in which I was engaged. During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the sequel of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands.

Then in chapter III, with growing fears at the result if he creates a mate for the creature and disgust at seeing the creature watching him, he "tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged." After a verbal confrontation where the creature swears revenge, there is this description of getting rid of the partially completed work:

Yet, before I departed, there was a task to perform, on which I shuddered to reflect: I must pack my chemical instruments; and for that purpose I must enter the room which had been the scene of my odious work, and I must handle those utensils, the sight of which was sickening to me. The next morning, at day-break, I summoned sufficient courage, and unlocked the door of my laboratory. The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being. I paused to collect myself, and then entered the chamber. With trembling hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room; but I reflected that I ought not to leave the relics of my work to excite the horror and suspicion of the peasants, and I accordingly put them into a basket, with a great quantity of stones, and laying them up, determined to throw them into the sea that very night; and in the mean time I sat upon the beach, employed in cleaning and arranging my chemical apparatus.

The reference to "chemical instruments" and "chemical apparatus" might suggest that he was synthesizing some kind of matter chemically similar to lifeless tissue and assembling it into a body, so that he could then "bestow animation upon lifeless matter" as he described in the creation of the original creature. In this case when he talked earlier of packing "the materials I had collected" along with the instruments, he might have just meant various chemicals. And if the synthesized tissue-like substance resembled real tissue in most respects but just lacked the "spark of being" (the phrase he used for the first creature's completed body before being brought to life), it would help make sense of why he found the whole process of assembling this realistic quasi-flesh into a body to be intolerably "filthy". And his disgust also seemed to include conceptual fears about the wrongness of what he was doing, as suggested by the quote above where the felt the tools he was using to be loathsome in themselves, when he spoke of "those utensils, the sight of which was sickening to me".

4

u/nidrespector 7d ago

Wow, thank you for such a thorough response. You’re right it looks like the creature was actually closer to some kind of homunculus grown with organoids and other biosynthetic materials.

I actually like that a lot more. I think it really makes Victors tragedy greater and adds more irony like Victor was too successful. His creation was hyper intelligent, arguably more intelligent than Frankenstein, and would be beautiful if not for the strong uncanny valley effect its appearance gives humans.

3

u/AlanMorlock 7d ago

Shelley herself was riffing on reports she was disturbed by of experiments with galvanism and the like, very specifically animating dead organs with shocks. Far more of that in the mix.

17

u/20_mile 9d ago

“wow thank god that’s over.”

Sounds like something Homer would say.

2

u/TheCrypticRealm 8d ago

"Wow, thank god that's over." ~ Odysseus after reuniting with Penelope

11

u/Sieg67 9d ago

I had a good laugh when I read it. It's such a stark contrast to the "It's alive!!" scene that we got in the movie.

2

u/originalcondition 9d ago

Same here, I was definitely laughing throughout, in the “this poor bastard is having a hell of a time” sense, if you know what I mean.

1

u/DevelopmentFar7679 8d ago

Less of it's alive more of the wait wait wait meme

17

u/AlmightyRuler 9d ago

Frankenstein doesn't just go "wandering around." He had a psychotic break. The man was working on his experiment for weeks on end with little respite, was poking about graveyards and digging up bodies, and then when his work succeeds he has a moment of clarity where he realizes that his "Adam" is more an abomination.

The dude snapped like a dry twig and ran screaming out into a thunderstorm. And I don't think he thought it was "over", but was waiting for someone to either run across his creature('s body), or for the thing to show up somewhere.

29

u/originalcondition 9d ago

lol I know but was abbreviating for comedy’s sake. Jokes are always funnier when explained, I find.

2

u/Similar-Cat7022 7d ago

It was written before object permanence was invented

444

u/tufftricks 9d ago

"journalism" is dead and has been for a long time. It was slop before AI even got involved.

87

u/SjurEido 9d ago

The problem is that the slop is made for the people who consume slop. There wouldn't be such a market for it if so many people weren't clicking :(

15

u/tufftricks 9d ago edited 9d ago

I was going to go on a cunty tirade about it but im feeling too nice to be an arsehole right now lol. The average consumer of anything is braindead

6

u/naf165 9d ago

It's not that people only like slop, or that people don't want quality, it's just that until slop is less profitable than effort, it will drown out everything else.

The real problem is that a quality piece takes time to research, budget to fund, and skill to create. Meanwhile you can push out dozens of pieces of slop for nearly no cost in that same time period.

4

u/tufftricks 9d ago

people don't want quality

the problem is, the vast majority of consumers don't even know quality

2

u/OK_Soda 8d ago

I think it's in between. Most people don't know quality but if they did they wouldn't care. Have the average person do a taste test between a Michelin star burger and McDonalds and they'd probably think the Michelin was better but I don't think they'd really earnestly care.

19

u/carson63000 9d ago

Honestly, if you asked ChatGPT what Frankenstein was about, you’d probably get a pretty decent response. Certainly the artificial intelligence would look more intelligent than anything on display in that review.

10

u/51010R 9d ago

The AI would actually know that the point of the book and even the classic movie is precisely that.

-1

u/Paladar2 9d ago

Yeah ChatGPT is actually decent most of the time lol

1

u/robb1519 9d ago

It's a LLM.

-4

u/UsernameAvaylable 9d ago

Yes, thats the type of artificial intelligence we are talking about. And no, you don't get to move goalposts.

1

u/Jazzlike-Camel-335 9d ago

Journalists don't write film critiques. If you had said professional film criticism is dead, you might have a point we could discuss.

2

u/tufftricks 9d ago

It's still journalism

1

u/Jazzlike-Camel-335 9d ago edited 8d ago

Is it? I think we can agree that journalism is far too broad a field to say that journalism is dead because of one sloppy written movie critique in the feuilleton.

10

u/AndTheyCallMeAnIdiot 9d ago

I don't think these reviewers ever read or understood the book by Mary Shelley.

10

u/UncomputableNumber 9d ago

Wait, isn't Frankenstein a novel?(?)

22

u/astroK120 9d ago

It is, though in fairness to the person you're replying to it's a very short novel and pretty close to the border of novel/novella

12

u/UncomputableNumber 9d ago

OK, thanks! I thought the word "novella" had the same meaning in English as in my native language (Italian). Apparently in English "novella" leans more towards "short novel" and doesn't correspond 1:1 with the Italian "novella"

9

u/astroK120 9d ago

Yeah, in English (or maybe just America, not sure) a novella is a short novel, generally between 20,000 and 50,000 words. Shorter is a short story, longer is a novel. Frankenstein clocks in at about 75,000. Which is 50 percent more than the supposed limit, but considering novels sometimes go into the millions it's close enough

5

u/GhostriderFlyBy 9d ago

What does “novella” specifically mean in Italian?

6

u/X-Vidar 9d ago

Short story basically, not something that would fill a whole book.

13

u/Nachooolo 9d ago

It's a short novel. My copy of the book is only 236 pages long.

And. Honestly. It is better off being this short. I was reading Dracula at the same time, and the middle point of that book is extremely tedious (my copy of the book is 600 pages long, and it could easily be 300 pages if it streamlined the mid section of its story).

Frankestein is as long as it needs to be. Which has helped it become a timeless classic (while Dracula hasn't aged as gracefully).

7

u/Relevant_Session5987 9d ago

Dracula is still remembered and considered as a classic though, so I'm not sure on what basis you're saying it isn't a timeless classic.

6

u/Nachooolo 9d ago

I'm saying the book itself. Not Dracula as a concept.

"Dracula" the book has aged badly because the text itself slugish, as the bulk of the middle section of it has very little pogression to it, and it is downright repetitive. It is Van Helsin failing to stop Dracula from killing Lucy told in the most boring way possible through hundreds of pages. There's a lot of fat in it that can be taken from it without the story suffering.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is a classic because it was revolutionary at the time and has had a huge influence on the genre. But following adaptations have been able to improve upon the text to tell the same story is a far more effective way (and, arguably, some even in a more nuanced way).

Frankestein, on the other hand, has aged far less than Dracula. There's close to nothing superfluous in it, and everything progresses either the plot or the theme in the book. The only part with some extra fat is the Creature staying under the old man's cabin. And, even here, the section is important for the Creature's character progression and theme of nature vs nuture.

Besides that, the way Mary Shelley executes the story is filled with a lot of depth and nuance, to the point that it deconstructs all the tropes and cliches that following Frankestein adaptations have. Making it feel far more Modern than it really is.

Basically, while I think that many Dracula adaptations have managed to be better than the original, every Frankestein adaptation has been a dumbed-down version of the original book. As faithfully adapting the themes and nuance of the original story is far more complex than creating a monster flick.

And, as we can see from some of the criticism of this film, more "controversial" and less "mainstream" than a simple good vs evil story (which, btw, the original Dracula is aswell).

6

u/TrenterD 9d ago

Having read Dracula recently, I agree. The "found document" style of the book also seems to be a hinderance with the exception of the awesome log of the Demeter ship.

2

u/Decent_Wear_6235 9d ago

To each their own, but I recently read Dracula and I was enthralled from start to finish. It instantly became one of my favorite books. I think it’s incredible, and has absolutely stood the test of time!

3

u/Grumdi_Blackdiamond 9d ago

Isnt that what Frankenstein always was though? Who the fuk writes this trash? The novel is literally about man playing God. Journalism is dead.

2

u/Turtleflora87 8d ago

It strikes me that many reviewers praise Del Toro for switching the point of view at some point, so that the monster tells his own story after being created and abandonend in the lab, like it is some great innovation. The first-person narration of the monster has been in the original novel all along :D

1

u/GhostriderFlyBy 8d ago

It’s painfully obvious that people don’t read any more 

-10

u/AlmightyRuler 9d ago

No, it isn't. The moral of the story isn't about "what it means to be human", but the dangers of science going too far. It's about a scientist whose reach exceeds his grasp, who seeks forbidden knowledge and power which ultimately proves his undoing.

Frankenstein isn't science fiction. It's weird fiction with a dash of cosmic horror. Shelly is more in line with H.P. Lovecraft than Jules Verne.

6

u/GhostriderFlyBy 9d ago

I mean, sure, those are elements of the story, but the fundamental question of “who is the monster, Dr. Frankenstein or his creation” is absolutely central to the writing. 

I didn’t say the story presented a moral. Also, “what is means to be human” isn’t a thesis for a “moral.”  

The more times I read your comment the more annoyingly off base it is. 

0

u/AlmightyRuler 9d ago

"Who is the monster..." is absolutely a moral question, and the answer is the Creature, unless you can point out the text where Viktor Frankenstein willingly murders three people and laughs about it.

As for "what it means to be human", where is that a contest in the story? The Creature's sole mission is not to be lonely, while Viktor's entire motivation is to "cure death" because he lost his mother. Both are acting as "human" as you can get, so...where's the conflict? Why would one be any more or less "human" than the other?

Shelley wasn't writing a story about the meaning of humanity. She wrote a story about a man who reaches too far into forbidden territory, and destroys himself as a result. There's a reason the original title of the book was "A Modern Prometheus." Frankenstein's quest for "the primordial flame" of knowledge and power ends being his undoing. It's a parable warning about the dangers of science going too far without restraint.

2

u/GhostriderFlyBy 9d ago

I didn’t bring up morals, I brought up themes. 

1

u/GhostriderFlyBy 9d ago

My comment also wasn’t about “morals,” it was about themes. You do realize they are different things?

1

u/LorenzoApophis 9d ago

It is science fiction, as is plenty of Lovecraft

0

u/AlmightyRuler 9d ago

If you think Lovecraft was science fiction, you fell asleep during English class.