Frankenstein (2025, Guillermo del Toro)

47/100

Challenging myself to make this of some marginal interest by not merely repeating "Del Toro does zilch for me" for the 11th time in 31 years. (Closest I've come to 'pro' territory is Pinocchio, which managed a 59 rating. Might also note that I have yet to like any movie I've seen that includes Mia Goth among its cast—not Nymph()maniac Vol. II, not High Life, not Suspiria, not X. That ain't all her fault, but thus far I'm not a fan. Oh, and I've disliked every Elordi-starring film I've caught: Priscilla and Saltburn and Oh, Canada. Same deal, movies are weak regardless but he didn't help any.)*

So: Why another Frankenstein movie, and more specifically, why another quasi-faithful Frankenstein movie? Kenneth Branagh tried this three decades ago, with what I dimly recall (didn't start writing reviews until the following year) as precious little success; Karloff's barely-verbal, inhuman-looking incarnation has such a hold on our collective imagination that Shelley's original conception of the character as someone who (eventually) could kick Curtis Yarvin's ass in a philosophy debate has difficulty gaining any traction. Like Dracula, it's a novel that, as written, simply doesn't translate well to cinema, which is why Universal devised more conventionally terrifying variants nearly a century ago. Del Toro benefits from huge advances in F/X tech (even since Branagh's time) that allow for some impressive cadaver-related grotesquerie—the film peaks early, with Doc Frank's demonstration to the Royal College of a re-animated half-corpse that's like one of Gerald Scarfe's shrieking wall-faces made flesh—and he's rewritten the narrative to conform to his own preoccupations, such that the film briefly appears to be reprising The Shape of Water (with Goth in Hawkins' role). But that required a much squishier and (even) more pitiable Creature, which no longer murders innocents (in the book, it actually frames someone for one of its murders!) and resides at the end of a hokey Bad Dad lineage. Fact is, anyone attempting to adapt Shelley's novel has to alter key aspects, because she wrote what's essentially a colloquy in narrative guise, and dramatizing that renders it too obviously incoherent. So I don't see the point of dispensing with the longstanding cultural revision of Frankenstein's monster in favor of a muddled beast/poet hybrid. That conceit only works on the page. Whale's Frankensteins barely reflect their source at all and are all the more potent for it. No need for correctives.

* "Then why bother with this film?" one might reasonably ask. A: Because my profession (such as it now is) demands, at least in my own mind, that I be conversant with a given year's most acclaimed films, irrespective of whether I anticipate much enjoying them. Frankenstein got raves from Glenn Kenny at Ebert.com and Alissa Wilkinson at the NYT (two such are generally all I need), and I'll be surprised if it's not among my concatenated top 50 for 2025 (all of which I see, though I can bail on the lower 25 if I've never previously seen a feature by that director). So I felt obligated. Once in a great while, this actually pays off—I'd walked out of three Villeneuve joints (Polytechnique, Incendies, Prisoners) before Sicario was "forced upon me" by its selection for Cannes Competition and wound up being my favorite film of 2015. And I despised both of Reygadas' features prior to Silent Light, currently my sixth-favorite film of the century. Even when it doesn't, though, having those films "under my belt" frequently proves useful in my job.