Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” released in select theaters starting Oct. 17 ahead of its Nov. 7 release on Netflix, might be a little different from the Mary Shelley classic you know and love.
It’s a gorgeous piece of cinema, with well-known actors like Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac and Mia Goth, but don’t let this necessarily sway you into watching it. The film is almost definitely not an adaptation of Shelley’s novel in any strict sense.
I would encourage you to think about it as less of an adaptation of “Frankenstein” and more as del Toro’s ongoing project of making monsters human and humans monstrous, which he does a great job of, while using Shelley’s scaffolding as a launching point.
Visually, it’s stunning. The production design is all stone, flickering candlelight and winter skies, while the score is enrapturing and truly immerses you in the film. This film appears to be the bold, maximalist, theatrical cinema that people complain isn’t made anymore. You do, in fact, leave the theater feeling moved, whether or not you agree with del Toro’s adaptation choices.
But if a “Frankenstein” lover is going in expecting Shelley, this is barely Shelley.
Whole characters, like Victor Frankenstein’s friend Henry Clerval, have been completely erased, and major plot points are fully changed. Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s wife and childhood friend, is completely different and not at all similar to the character presented in the novel.
Shelley’s novel’s rhetorical questions — What is a person? Who counts as human? Where is the line between creation and responsibility? — are seemingly swapped out for del Toro’s more contemporary emotional interests.
These include themes like the punishment of innocence, generational guilt and the psychological damage caused by abandonment. While these sentiments are expressed in the novel as well, Frankenstein’s creature is portrayed less as a philosophical problem and more as a wounded child trying to make sense of a world that immediately rejects him.
While the film is fundamentally a different story, it’s still a good one, but keep in mind that you may have to imagine it as a different piece altogether.
The bottom line is, while del Toro’s film barely follows “Frankenstein” as a novel, it’s still absolutely worth seeing.
