When I learned that I hadn't seen any of the Academy Best Picture nominees for the year, I chose the first one I could find. Ordinarily, I save arguable horror movies for October. I say "arguable" because Wikipedia characterizes it as "Gothic science fiction drama." That's fair enough.
The movie begins near the end, when 19th-century Danish sailors find a nearly dead Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) in the Arctic and try to protect him from his raging creation (Jacob Elordi). In the captain's cabin, Victor tells Captain Andersen (Lars Mikkelsen) the first half of the story. Then the creature shows up and takes the narration from there. In the small chance you don't know the gist, Victor stitched together parts from different corpses and brought the gestalt to life but didn't raise him properly, leaving him put upon by society and violently resentful.
I read the Mary Shelley novel pretty recently, so I noticed plenty of divergence from the source material. Victor's younger brother, William (Felix Kammerer), is not a mere child for most of the story. William's fiancée, Elizabeth Hardlander (Mia Goth, who also plays the mother of Victor and William early on), becomes Victor's unrequited crush. Victor brings fleeting life to incomplete bodies before moving on to his masterpiece. Elizabeth's uncle, Henrich (Christoph Waltz), funds the experiments when everyone else shuns them as desecration, for his own reasons. Victor doesn't spurn the creature immediately, only after losing patience with his slow learning and becoming jealous of Elizabeth's sympathetic affection for him. Yeah, it's not just the blind man (David Bradley) who doesn't assume the worst at first sight. The creature never kills anyone who doesn't attack him first, but sometimes he's wrongly accused, not least by Victor. And I later understood that the film is set decades after the book's publication -- still too soon to account for the dynamite sticks.
I'm not complaining about the differences. They're no more severe than in the Universal series, and Shelley's point about Victor's detrimental hubris is driven home well. In fact, I think the liberties mostly work for the better. From what I gather, the most faithful Frankenstein adaptations are mediocre.
Not to say that everything is improved. I question the characters who do see the creature as a threatening "it" right away; to me, he looks like a man in odd makeup. Despite the creature's relative innocence, a few scenes get remarkably gory; I guess that enhances the fear factor, but still. You don't have to know much about science to deem the "sci-fi" label generous, as when the creature's rapid if erratic healing makes him appear completely immortal. And Elizabeth's feelings for him come uncomfortably close to the weird romance in The Shape of Water. Eh, what can we expect from writer-director Guillermo del Toro?
Nonetheless, here he usually succeeds in evoking the intended emotions, which are thankfully not as relentlessly dreary as in the book. The visual effects are not state-of-the-art, partly because del Toro didn't want too much CGI, but they do get genuinely artistic -- without overdoing it. Ultimately, his version of the story is poignant.
Frankenstein isn't likely to win the top Oscar, but I'm glad it was made. Or should I say "created"?
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