When Mary Shelley first published her novel “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” in 1818, its title page was printed with a telling epigraph from “Paradise Lost,” in which a despairing Adam rebukes God: “Did I request thee, Maker from my Clay / To mould me Man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?” Did I ask you to make me? the creation demands of his creator. I never asked to be here, and now you condemn me to this life of pain.
Shelley’s book is full of allusions, literary and philosophical and mythical. (See the title.) But “Paradise Lost” may be the most fundamental; during the month she began the novel, Shelley noted in her journals that her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, often read aloud to her from Milton’s epic. Her book’s main characters frequently parallel Milton’s: an almighty creator God; an antihero Satan, the fallen angel who sought to usurp God; and Adam, a creation abandoned by his creator in a world he doesn’t understand. Her creature even experiences self-realization by reading “Paradise Lost.”
For his version of “Frankenstein” — the movie he was clearly born to make — Guillermo del Toro leans hard into “Paradise Lost,” with his own twist. Del Toro’s lifelong obsession with the story began in childhood, and he loved watching Boris Karloff portray the creature in the classic 1931 film, the one most of us still think of when we think about Frankenstein. Like generations of readers and audiences — “Frankenstein” was first produced for the stage in 1823, only five years after the novel’s first publication — del Toro was drawn to the pathos, the tragedy, the strange beauty of the tale.
But this “Frankenstein” is unmistakably del Toro’s, and it bears every single one of his fingerprints. Lush, melodramatic, sweepingly romantic and achingly emotional, it is a tale of fathers and sons, of lovers and outcasts, of men as the true monsters. Abandoned creatures struggle to understand an excruciating world, and their creators, their parents, never fully understood it either. Shelley’s skeleton is there, but the flesh around it is del Toro’s.
You probably know the broad outlines, so just a few notes: The novel is set in late-18th-century Germany and Switzerland, but del Toro shifts forward by about 60 years, to Victorian England and then the Continent. (Some of the historical references are scrambled enough that it’s safe to assume it eventually drifts into fantasy.) Certain other plot points have been streamlined; purists will pick up on the changes.
But despite all these changes, the story’s heart remains. Captain Anderson’s ship, bound for the North Pole, is stuck in the ice. Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) and his men spot an explosion in the distance, then a wounded man laying on the surface. They take him on board. It is Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), seemingly near death. He tells them his tale: a happy childhood turned sour after his mother died giving birth to his brother William. This made him determined to conquer death — in essence, to conquer God. When he became a doctor, this very pursuit scandalized the Royal College of Medicine and made him a pariah.
But he met Herr Harlander (Christoph Waltz), an arms dealer whose beautiful and enigmatic niece, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), was also engaged to marry William (Felix Kammerer), now grown. Harlander offered to fund Victor’s research, and so his pursuit began. One night, the unthinkable happened. A body fused together from pieces of corpses harvested from a battlefield came alive in a terrifying electrical storm, and his creature (Jacob Elordi) was born, so to speak, into the world.
Eschewing the boorish semi-verbal lunk of many “Frankenstein” renditions, del Toro’s creature is capable of complex thought and speech, though it takes him a while to get there. Elordi, who towers over everyone else at 6-foot-5, plays him like a lanky baby just discovering the world, and Isaac gives us Victor as a briefly joyous parent who sinks rapidly into something approximating postpartum malaise, then petulance when his creation-slash-child refuses to cater to his whims.
This is a great cast, but Elordi is the standout. He’s under a lot of makeup, of course — following early stage productions of “Frankenstein,” del Toro elects to give the creature’s skin a bluish cast, the pallor of dead skin, rather than the green we’ve more often seen in cinema. He’s almost beautiful, but otherworldly: Starting out innocent, he grows slowly more wretched as he is broken down first by his maker-father, then by everyone else. Elordi has to move like a baby, then an animal, then a man and then a menace; it is a breakout performance worthy of serious attention.
This “Frankenstein” is (wisely) slimmed down from Shelley’s, but it’s loaded with subtle thematic and narrative layers, too many to name here. Victor Frankenstein’s mania, for instance, is always in the background of the story, coloring his activities, giving extra depth to some of his declarations. The inclusion in the story of a certain technology invented in the Victorian age both explains the shift forward in the timeline from the novel and makes a heartbreaking moment in the creature’s self-discovery possible.
Del Toro has always had an eye for the ways beauty and brutality weave themselves together in human life, and “Frankenstein” is an ideal text for that interest. But the movie also spotlights something he understands intuitively: the difference between the destruction of life — nasty, brutish and quick, as when an unhinged act of violence results in the twisting of limbs or the cracking of bones or a bullet to an eyeball — and the heartbroken and lovely form that life can take at its end. There are some images so stunning I could barely look at them in “Frankenstein,” and some I blinked away from for exactly the other reason. Del Toro has always made movies like that; in this story the theme fits the form perfectly.
But it is Milton I couldn’t stop seeing throughout this version of “Frankenstein.” There is some complex theological remixing going on in Shelley’s book — casting the creature as a “new Adam” (a term biblically applied to Jesus), ideas about the breath of God and the soul. Del Toro carries all this over, having Victor declare “It is finished!” when he places the last touch on the creature’s body, then cranking it on wooden planks into an obvious upright cruciform shape. He returns repeatedly to angel imagery; he, too, has his creature read from “Paradise Lost” and wonder why he was made.
Yet he has compassion for both the creature and for Victor, and gives them endings that befit that epigraph Shelley provided in the first edition of her novel. This is a story about feeling lost in a cruel world, after all, and seeking an explanation, and choosing to live. But del Toro puts a softhearted, romantic spin on it; you can tell this is a personal story for him. He is working something out here, because Shelley’s tale has come to feel like his own.
In so doing, he rewrites Milton a little, too, trying to change the ending of both. Whether or not that’s satisfying depends on who’s watching. But I get the sense, for this creation’s creator, it represents his own grasping, imperfect, longing act of love.
Frankenstein
Rated R for some truly bone-cracking, hair-raising moments of body horror. Running time: 2 hours 29 minutes. In theaters; available on Netflix on Nov. 7.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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