Hal Kitchen
Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to call Guillermo del Toro one of our greatest modern filmmakers, but there’s no denying he falls into a select category of directors who have to date, never failed to deliver their viewers a good time. Sadly, he’s been forced to spend an inordinate amount of his career working on projects that have yet to see the light of day, or battling studios for creative control. The failure of his The Hobbit duology or his At the Mountains of Madness adaptation have become the stuff of Hollywood folklore: cautionary tales of what can happen when studios and creatives are unable to reconcile their dreaded “creative differences”.
For a while, every new Del Toro film that made it to release felt like a small miracle. That all changed in 2017 with the release of the wildly successful The Shape of Water. Off the back of a genuine mid-budget studio hit and a best picture Oscar win, all without diluting his signature fairytale tropes, no one could tell Del Toro his work was “too weird for the mainstream” anymore. Since then, he’s undergone a renaissance, coming over all Alfred Hitchcock and curating his own TV anthology series, Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and using his newfound industry pull to finally bring two of his most long-gestating babies to term, with Nightmare Alley in 2021 and Pinocchio in 2022. Del Toro finally seems free to make whatever he wants on his own terms, and there was one, seemingly inevitable place to go next.
Widely considered the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic has been beloved of cinema since the medium’s inception, with adaptations of the story instrumental in the development of the horror genre, swiftly becoming a keystone of both the Universal and Hammer Studios horror brands. The influence of James Whale’s pre-code masterpieces Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein cannot be overestimated, especially where Del Toro’s work is concerned. Given that Del Toro is a rare auteur who specializes in reworking genre classics through his own lens, and that he’s already delivered his own spin on one of the other great Universal monster icons through The Shape of Water, it’s the least surprising thing in the world for him to set his sights on Shelley’s foundational text.
Set to release through Netflix this November, Frankenstein clearly has aspirations of being nothing less than the definitive screen adaptation of the novel. Whale’s films, though magnificent, are very much their own creation, and little of the novel’s structure or perspective remains. Del Toro has stated in interviews that the best moments of the novel have yet to be done justice on screen, and it’s clear from this first view that he aims to do just that. Much of the trailer’s action focuses on the snowy wastes and the iced-in ship where a fleeing Victor Frankenstein is discovered and tells his story in the novel’s frame narrative, suggesting that the film will itself adopt the same flashback structure. The trapped ship, crewed by starving men, pulling the dishevelled doctor in off the ice, Adam’s tormented howling echoing across the snowy wastes, is a setting so evocative it’s no wonder Del Toro found it irresistible.
From there we seem to flash back to see how the creature came to be, and how the conflict between him and Frankenstein began. There’s a lot of open space in the scenes that follow; the sets for the film’s lecture theatres and private studies are expansive and dimly lit, cavernous, with stark daylight and flickering candles. It’s an unusually pallid look for Del Toro, whose films always have a defining colour, be it the vivid red of Crimson Peak, the oceanic green of The Shape of Water or the sickly gold of Nightmare Alley. For Frankenstein, the most pervasive colour seems to be white. With white snows and white light, even white lightning, it’s a harsh and incriminating light that Dan Laustsen has selected this time. It’s a light of discovery, and of accusation, casting a spotlight on its overambitious protagonist, leaving his folly entombed in shadowy furs.
Other visual highlights in the trailer include the sarcophagus of a young woman, swaddled in white marble and red satin; the vivid religious horror of Frankenstein’s lab; the creature adopting a cruciform pose bathed in satanic red light; and a nightmarish winter battlefield of corpses frozen into a grotesque battle tableau. If nothing else, Del Toro always assures his viewers of some real eye candy.
Del Toro should have little fear about drawing in audiences this time. After all, it’s the same formula that pulled in viewers to Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu at the end of last year: a classic of horror cinema as old as the genre itself, given a frosty retexture with a cast of young talents, all hot properties as far as the box office is concerned. Oscar Isaac has a brusque masculinity and passionate edge that could well serve the title role. Mia Goth was born to play cracked gothic heroines, though we see little of her performance in this trailer. Two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz is always a welcome sight, and he’ll be playing Dr. Pretorious, a character created for Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, suggesting that Del Toro’s version will be a combination of past literary and cinematic treatments. Perhaps it is to Dr. Pretorious that Victor will tell his tale?
And of course, there is matinee idol Jacob Elordi as the creation himself. The trailer wisely hides Elordi, showing us just a few glimpses of torso and one intimidating yell at the end, so it remains to be seen how well the Saltburn heartthrob will take to the part. He definitely seems an unusual choice, even if the 6’5 Australian certainly has the physical presence to pull it off. In Del Toro’s original conception for the role, it was to have gone to his regular collaborator and industry legend Doug Jones, who has embodied many of Del Toro’s iconic monsters, from the fawn and pale man in Pan’s Labyrinth to the Amphibian lover in The Shape of Water. Moving to a more recognisable star suggests more face-time for the antihero, with more chances for him to show off some personality. Del Toro has stressed that it is the “emptiness” of the figure that most moved him about Christopher Lee’s interpretation, suggesting that Elordi’s Adam will be a true figure of horror.
