Sincerity is dead at the movies, and this fall season has treated us to a preponderance of autopsies as proof — Bugonia, A House of Dynamite, Die My Love, (sneakily) Blue Moon. Yet it just might find a second life in the loving arms of Guillermo del Toro, and, if the hype machine is to be believed, Frankenstein is the movie he was born to make. The story certainly suits his taste, but del Toro’s Frankenstein is a Frankenstein drained of existential inquiry, a cuddly Frankenstein that overflows with violence and gooey, sappy, sticky schmaltz. If del Toro is the one reviving it, maybe sincerity should have stayed down a little longer.
The film opens not entirely unlike the novel, with a shipwrecked squadron of sailors saving mad scientist Victor Frankenstein from certain death hunting for his dreadful creation in the Arctic tundra. It’s clear from frame one del Toro loves the material, but it’s just as obvious that he has no real grasp on what his material can do standing on its own two feet: lest we get bored, he immediately departs from Mary Shelley’s chilly introspection to a hulk-out courtesy of his Creature (which reminds more of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus than anything). Shelley likely didn’t have tri-muzzled Blunderbusses and flesh-tearing action in mind when she wrote her book; then again, asking Guillermo del Toro to faithfully adapt Shelley’s narrative or honestly reckon with her ideas is like asking a cow to bark — it’s just not going to happen. His process necessitates a flattening of nuance in order for his baroque style to take center stage, and he approaches the source material not with requisite melancholy, but with studio system swagger.
There’s something to be said for completely disrespecting the work you’re adapting, however, and del Toro has made no secret that he’s a dirty cinephile like the rest of us. He would inevitably take Frankenstein and rework it in the image of his influences from Planet Criterion: Stanley Kubrick (via Barry Lyndon), Terry Gilliam, Tod Browning — all names that make the movie sound more interesting than it is. Part One, “Victor’s Story,” is really just an excuse for del Toro to unleash his penchant for ornate production design and gothic lighting: Oscar Isaac slithers his way through ersatz 19th century Europe writ del Toro as he stumbles toward a solution to the problem of bringing the dead back to life. Isaac is bad in the role of Victor until you realize that he’s just playing emo Peter Parker from Spider-Man 3, and his ostentatious performance speaks to the impossible Frankensteinian task del Toro has established for himself here — to stitch together the ridiculous and the earnest, and be taken seriously doing so. Smashing references into each other for what he calls “eye protein” — images that are both beautiful and contribute to the movie’s forward momentum — del Toro does at least know his way around and through a scene: Elizabeth (the kind of strong-willed, “a well-read woman is a dangerous creature” love interest only a well-intentioned and deeply misguided man could write) holds a bright red umbrella among a sea of black ones in a sequence resembling a reanimated Jacques Demy; a digital sweep through Victor’s laboratory as Alexandre Desplat’s Elfmanish score crescendos recalls the Hunchback of Notre Dame of Universal’s silent heyday, inflected with Burtonian adolescent glee; as lighting strikes, bringing the Creature to life, del Toro submerges his camera into its thumping viscera à la Death Stranding. Part One is a wild romp through media history — and great fun for those who take pleasure in mumbling to themselves or informing the unfortunate person next to them where a particular cue came from — but when focus shifts to the Creature and the movie slows down, del Toro’s ruse is exposed: he mutilates Shelley’s book, but he also has no idea how to do anything productive with the mangled parts or the antecedents for whom he clearly holds a deeper reverence.
Like most movies adopting the two-part structure now — a narrative ploy perhaps taken up to imbue movies with literary pretention in light of their steady decline as a mass art — del Toro imperfectly cleaves his movie in half, giving Victor two-thirds of the runtime because that’s obviously more interesting than fraternizing with a humanoid who reads Paradise Lost. When we do get around to “The Creature’s Tale,” del Toro uses it as an opportunity to remake the Hermit scene from The Bride of Frankenstein, depriving it of its Christian passion and bloating it to the size of a Skyrim side quest with half-remembered fragments from the novel. It’s a moving detour, to be sure — it would be in anyone’s hands, the ache for human connection being so baked into it — but it vacuums up most of Part Two, which then returns to Victor’s point of view anyway at a wedding gone wrong. It’s at this precise moment that the movie collapses: all the narrative loose ends that went underdeveloped in the first part are awkwardly tied together in a needlessly rushed and violent climax. Before we get a chance to digest any of it, del Toro whisks us back to the Arctic for a sickly saccharine reconciliation between Creature and Creator; or rather — del Toro would be remiss if he didn’t let us know — between father and son. A single tear and a Lord Byron quote send us on our way, beckoning us to live in spite of the heartbreak we never actually felt.
Frankenstein is 20,000 leagues ahead of 2017’s godawful abomination The Shape of Water, but it’s still genetically engineered to move us with the pyrotechnics del Toro uses to conceal his fundamental incompetence with human-feeling characters. In searching for the place where Hammer and highbrow meet, del Toro’s Frankenstein does have its moments — Charles Dance does a great Christopher Lee impression in the film’s opening chapter, and the garish CG set-pieces make for great camp — but the math is wildly off, and the resulting creature is more than a little unsightly.
DIRECTOR: Guillermo del Toro; CAST: Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: October 17; STREAMING: November 7; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 29 min.
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