Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein: A Review

Warning: this article will contain spoilers for the film! Proceed at your own risk.

Photo via Rotten Tomatoes

October has reached its untimely end. The leaves of those gentle, swaying forests which fill the rugged wounds of the earth with their soothing salve have long shed their former verdancy, filling the air with their life-giving fire: a well-paced dance of scarlet and gold. Whispers and excitement electrify the air: “All Hallow’s Eve is nigh!” And, oh, a movie comes out.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein has been, at least, for me, a long-awaited film. Finally, after all these years, there is a film that might, just ever so possibly, get across the messages that Mary Shelley tried to convey in her 1818 novel. Finally, a monster not called by the poorly-used surname Frankenstein; a Frankenstein that is shown as the monster he truly is. In the end, however, the film was both exactly what I expected and the complete opposite.

I stepped into the theatre with several expectations: I knew the film was going to diverge from the novel. After all, Guillermo del Toro is known for his love of monsters and his firm belief in their innocence. This was going to be a film where the Creature was going to be kind, loving in some way. This was also, no matter what, a movie; it would be impossible to replicate Mary Shelley’s novel in its full original glory, and, I must say, I got what I expected. What I did not expect was the sheer level of divergence from the novel, with deviations in both the themes and in the plot.

The Beginning.

The film starts, as the novel does, with a ship. Differences can be seen immediately, however. The Horisont, a ship of the Danish Royal Navy, has no Walton sending letters or a glorious end goal in the study of magnetic fields. Upon the ice where they are stranded, they discover a wounded Frankenstein, whom they bring up on the ship only to hear an inhuman roar. Here is the first appearance of the man, of the monster, known by many different names and natures. Here, the Creature is a monster—attacking the sailors and the ship and demanding in a growling, animalistic voice, “Give him to me!,” only to be met with rifles and bullets. Despite being shot several times in the chest and arms, the Creature continues his violent tirade with the same vigor; and here we see my first big complaint about the film: the Creature’s immortality.

Throughout the entire film, the Creature is portrayed with the inhuman quality of being able to quickly heal any wound inflicted upon him. He heals from a bullet wound within a few minutes, and from a cut in mere seconds. This choice is something I both understand and firmly disagree with. On one hand, it only furthers the idea that the Creature was brought to life against his will, and that he has no power to end his miserable existence as much as he would like to. The downside of this decision, in my opinion, is that it only separates the Creature further from humanity. In the novel, the Creature is discriminated against solely because of his appearance; his soul, his thoughts, and his powers are mostly that of a regular human, with the exception of his large stature and inhuman strength. Here, he is only more of a monster.

Part I: Victor’s Tale

It is aboard this ship that Victor Frankenstein begins to tell his tale.

Frankenstein starts by describing his childhood. He was the only child of a loving, overly doting mother and a loathing, strict, uncaring father, who was the most famous surgeon in Europe at the time—a fully different backstory from the one in the novel. He is the one who teaches Victor science and medicine, telling him that, as the sole heir bearing the family name, he has to be the one to continue his legacy, striking him if he ever makes a mistake. This decision to make Victor’s father a cold-hearted, abusive man was del Toro’s personal decision, desiring to make a film that discussed the often never-ending cycle of familial violence.

It is at this time in his life that one of the major turning points in Victor’s life occurs: the death of his mother. She dies of complications during pregnancy, unable to be saved by the best surgeon in all of Europe, her husband. Her baby, William Frankenstein, however, was saved: he is Victor’s younger by only a few years and seems to be a combination both of William and Clerval, who doesn’t appear in the film. (He does not cause the reaction, as a wise man once told me, of “me when Henry Clerval clervals”).

In the end, this backstory, as well as his father’s never-ending love for William, sparks a chain reaction that leads up to the evil, cold-hearted Victor that we (well, maybe not all of us) know and love. But, let’s skip some of the plot and inaccuracies and go right ahead to what I think (with a slight bias, perhaps) is the best character in this whole film: the Creature. I will skip over most of the plot of the second part and concentrate simply on the most interesting points of the second part.

Part II: The Creature’s Tale

The relationship between Victor and the Creature is even more unhealthy than in the novel. In the film, instead of simply running away from the poor thing and leaving him to fend for himself, Victor takes full responsibility of the Creature, chaining him up in his basement and setting the building on fire in a futile attempt to get rid of him. A bit dramatic, don’t you think? It is in contrast to this violence that we get to see one of the strangest points of the entire movie: the relationship between Elizabeth Harlander (not Lavenza in this version) and the Creature. There is quite a lot of discourse about the relationship between these two: some see them as mother and son and some see them as a couple, though from what I’ve observed more seem to agree on the latter, as strange as it is.

The Creature is portrayed in del Toro’s film as innocent as a baby. Although causing several deaths over the course of the film, it is Victor who is fully responsible for the deaths of both Elizabeth and William, a change I completely disagree with. This is my main disagreement with the movie: it is completely black and white. Victor is the figure of evil, killing, maiming, playing God and all for his personal gain, with no thought to others and to his actions. The Creature is an angel, mistreated, naïve and caring, which is only one side of the coin that is his book counterpart. This was partly expected by me, partly due to del Toro’s famous quality of loving monsters more than humans, but I did not expect it to be present to such a degree.

But all that has no competition with what I think is the strangest, weirdest, worst-paced part of this whole experience: the end, where there is a reconciliation between father and son, between God and Adam, between Victor and his Creature. It is an ending which almost left me loudly yelling, “What?!” through the whole theatre. After all the bad things Victor has caused his creation, after all the suffering both have inflicted upon the other, upon Victor’s deathbed, the two share a final embrace and forgive the other, with Victor’s words, “And if you have it in your heart, forgive yourself into existence. If death is not to be, then consider this, my son. While you are alive, what recourse do you have but to live?”  All in all, a completely different ending from the one written by Mary Shelley in 1818; though both figure a moment of forgiveness between father and son, one is decidedly less unexpected that the other.

Despite all the inaccuracies present in the film and all of the slight annoyances it caused me while watching it, I still think that the film (which was never marketed as a book-accurate adaptation, by the way) is one of the better Frankenstein adaptations out there. Jacob Elordi, in my veritably humble opinion, is the best monster out there with his “hair [..] of a lustrous black, and flowing” (Shelley) and big brown eyes which, although not described in the original novel, definitely added an element of humanity to the Creature.

I rate Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein a solid 3 both out of five and on the SF Chronicle Little Man scale.

San Francisco Chronicle's Little Man Rating System. Photo by Warren Goodrich via HowlRound Theatre Commons