Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ Is Monstrous Letdown; All Style, No Soul [Venice]

Guillermo del Toro has finally made Frankenstein, and the shock is that it’s not the immaculate creation he’s been trying to make for decades, it’s a letdown.

First off, let’s briefly tackle the reviews. The mixed or mixed-to-positive ones are Variety, Next Best Picture (5/10), The Guardian (3/5), The Independent (3/5), IndieWire (B), The Times (2/5), Inverse, The Independent (3/5), HeyUGuys (3/5) The raves coming in are
Screen, Time Out, The Telegraph (4/5) The Wrap, Little White Lies and THR, so far.

You can see all the signatures of del Toro’s cinema in this film— especially the lavish sets —but you can also feel the Netflix of it. It’s a big, expensive movie that somehow manages to feel less invigorating than “Pan’s Labyrinth,” which cost a fraction and gave us a 21st-century Wizard of Oz. Here, size is everything, and depth gets lost in the grandeur.

The production is polished, the story mostly adheres to the novel, but then del Toro makes a baffling choice: he drains Victor Frankenstein of his idealism, his obsession with discovery, and turns him into a violent madman. Oscar Isaac throws himself into the part, but the role is written as caricature, not character.

And del Toro’s big twist? His monster can’t die—he’s like the T-1000- every bullet hole and stab wound rapidly heals. He gets shot so often it starts to feel like target practice.

Jacob Elordi has the size (6’5”) to be the monster, but his design makes him look like a plastic god from the opening credits of “Prometheus.” He roars like a lion, stomps like a brute, and nothing else. Mary Shelley’s question, the aching fascination of her story, about what it means to create life, is gone.

The script is full of inflated, theatrical moments that exist only because someone thought they’d look good on screen. Christoph Waltz drops in briefly as Viktor’s financier and reminds you what a talent he is. Mia Goth, stuck with the distanced “love interest,” barely registers, not because she can’t act but because the script treats her as an afterthought. There’s an evocative score, and del Toro still knows how to stage, but it all feels like a painting without emotion. In fact, strip away the gore, make it PG-13, and it could pass as a Disney “reimagining.”

Del Toro has taken one of the great cautionary tales of human ambition and turned it into an exercise in style, so refined it forgets depth.