Style over substance as monster of a movie gets lost in its Gothic posing

1 month ago 6

FILM
Frankenstein ★★
(MA) 150 minutes

Anyone who’s ever seen a film by Guillermo Del Toro knows he loves monsters. Maybe he loves them a little too much, though his new version of Frankenstein doesn’t go to the lengths of his Oscar-winning The Shape of Water, where the relationship between the mute heroine (Sally Hawkins) and a captured sea monster (Doug Jones) eventually turned physical in the fullest sense.

What we do get here is Mia Goth in a fuchsia-pink bonnet and blood-red gown, cosying up to the bare-chested Creature (Jacob Elordi) imprisoned in the basement of the dank Gothic laboratory of his maker, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac).

In this telling of the tale, Goth’s character Elizabeth is a pure-hearted amateur biologist with compassion for all God’s creatures, barring the arrogant Victor himself – one of Nature’s incels, whom she rejects as a suitor in favour of his sweeter younger brother (Felix Kammerer).

That isn’t quite how things went down in Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel, which Del Toro’s script reconfigures extensively. Still, the film retains a lumbering Classics Illustrated quality, compounded by the running time of two-and-a-half hours, even longer than Kenneth Branagh’s disastrous 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (James Whale’s 1931 classic gets the job done in 71 minutes, which is the right idea).

Like the novel, this Frankenstein begins in the Arctic, where the rampaging Creature makes short work of half-a-dozen members of the crew of a Danish expedition ship trapped in ice. Once things have calmed down, Victor shows up to recount his life story to the patient Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen), starting with his privileged but unhappy childhood, when his tyrannical father (Charles Dance) treated him with the same cruelty he later directed towards his own manufactured “son”.

Again not in the book, this “cycles of abuse” theme represents some kind of bid to modernise the material, while the appearance of Goth in a second role as Victor’s mother amounts to an invitation to viewers to supply their own subtext.

But nuance of any kind has little chance against the almost comically heightened artifice of the production, the colour grading above all – as if the Gothic backdrops were part of a themed fashion shoot, meant to show off the work of costume designer Kate Hawley to best advantage.

In keeping with this aesthetic, the actors are mainly called upon to strike poses, without seeming sure if they should be aiming for all-out camp. Perhaps the project should have been reconceived as a musical, in the vein of Phantom of the Opera or Sweeney Todd: Alexandre Desplat’s score has a lot of that energy anyway, especially when the camera is literally waltzing around the laboratory while Victor goes about his grisly work.

Yet Isaac, who once seemed like a movie star in waiting, has hardly a moment where he’s allowed to be sympathetic, let alone charming. All Del Toro’s sympathy is reserved for Elordi’s gaunt, sensitive, suffering monster, a victimised hero for our times, with long limbs like the aliens in Avatar and healing powers akin to those of Wolverine.

When the Creature tells his own tale in the second half, the tweaks to the version we know are aimed mostly at ensuring he retains our sympathy in turn. Even when his justified rage leads to a degree of collateral damage, Del Toro is willing to let this slide, in the spirit of The Simpsons’ immortal parody of King Kong – which first shows a giant gorilla squishing everyone in sight, then cuts to the end with Homer blubbing on the couch at how heartlessly the same gorilla has been treated. “It’s so unfair. Just because he’s different.”

Frankenstein is in cinemas from Thursday

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