‘Frankenstein’

What’s​ new? An old song begs our pardon for asking that. Guillermo del Toro’s new film, Frankenstein, is too busy to bother with such a query, but it’s aware of its own prehistory. It knows, for example, that if we ask AI how many films about Frankenstein there have been it will say it doesn’t know for sure, but there are more than four hundred. That’s just full-length films; the list doesn’t include shorts or TV shows. The obvious next question for del Toro would be ‘Why?’ or ‘Why now?’ A less obvious, more unanswerable question might be ‘Why not?’ Or: ‘Is it ever too late in the world of mythology?’ Mary Shelley borrowed a lot from Paradise Lost and at one point in her novel has a character promise he is not going to kill Coleridge’s albatross.

In all versions of the story a human competes with God by creating a living being. The difference in del Toro’s version is that the creator doesn’t immediately freak out with horror when he sees what he has done. He rather likes the creature, shows it that the sun is the sun and teaches it to pronounce its creator’s name, ‘Victor’. The creature (played by Jacob Elordi) is made up of pieces of human remains picked up after a battle in Crimea, but it looks more stylish and romantic than monstrous. Like a jigsaw puzzle, let’s say, rather than our idea of a serial killer or a crime against divinity. Our idea of what such figures look like and how disappointing the reality may turn out to be is a large part of the myth. Another large part is our idea of ourselves. In the novel, Shelley gives us a wonderful hint of this through her use of the word ‘became’. Victor doesn’t say ‘when my father got married and had a child’; he says ‘when my father became a husband and a parent’. The role’s the thing, and it’s hard to live up to.

In the movie, Victor and his father are portrayed by Oscar Isaac and Charles Dance. They play, perfectly, the classic Oedipal parts of brilliant bullied child and impatient, self-admiring father. And they lead us into those zones of the monster myth del Toro is most interested in: the tendencies of geniuses to be unhappy with success, of caretakers not to take care and the magical games truth can play with fact. There is an autobiographical touch too. For a long time, del Toro recently told Parul Sehgal, who interviewed him for the New York Times Magazine, ‘I was so busy being a son, I did not realise I was a father.’ In a way the myth, wherever or whatever it is, works mainly through the metaphors it chooses to lean on for the relation of maker to made: child and parent, master and slave, native and foreigner, many more relational structures.

Del Toro’s film begins where Mary Shelley’s story ends – in 1857, six years after her death. The location is the Arctic, though in the movie it’s called ‘the Farthermost North’, for which it’s hard not to read ‘fathermost’. A vast ship is stuck in the ice. The stranded crew encounter a wounded Victor, who is trying to catch up with his creation, and seems at last willing to take some responsibility for the creature’s actions. He is especially worried because, as he says, ‘it cannot die.’ He has gone one better than God; he has not merely created a human, but has imbued human remains with a dangerous form of immortality. The creature falls through the ice, and a long flashback begins. Victor, looking ahead to magical realism rather than to the Gothic novel, says of the story he is about to tell that not all is fact ‘but it is all true.’

In a spectacular scene in Edinburgh, where he works and prepares for his grand experiment, Victor explains his plans to an audience and shows the way his experiment will work by tossing a ball to what looks like a statue. The statue catches the ball. This is part of his take on the ‘truth’ of things, and a result of his conviction that ‘God is inept.’ It is this belief, rather than his scientific magic, that is getting him into trouble, and leads to his expulsion from the Royal College of Medicine. In another fabulous scene, anxious to find out a little more about his brother’s fiancée, Elizabeth (played with a good mix of innocence and smarts by Mia Goth), Victor slips into the priest’s side of a confessional booth and listens to Elizabeth recite her sins. Not a good move (or a great move), since her chief sin is to hate him and his arrogance. ‘He is far cruder than he believes himself to be,’ she says. This turns out to be very good for the film and their relationship. They develop an ironic idiom between them. Both know there’s only one answer to the question ‘Was it worth it?’: ‘Is anything?’

The big event happens; some people die in the process. A man called Harlander, played by Christoph Waltz, who has funded Victor’s research, wants his brain to be inserted into the creature’s body in order to deal with his syphilis. He thinks immortality might be a good way out, but Victor doesn’t agree. Soon after the monster comes to life, his creator begins to argue with him. The creature is not scary but boring, a model of the inferiority of every sort of being that is not human. Elizabeth rebukes Victor for his prejudice. He decides the only thing to do is get rid of his creature, and he sets fire to his laboratory after leaving the creature chained there. He changes his mind too late and manages only to injure himself when the building explodes.

At this point the film’s narrative point of view changes, and we watch a version of what is called ‘The Creature’s Tale’. As in Shelley’s novel, it spies on and helps a lonely rural family, and in return learns to read and write and speak. Confronted with its inherent immortality, the creature decides it needs a mate and asks Victor if he will supply one. Victor is disgusted at such an idea, or rather at two ideas – of returning to the necessary kind of work and of the horrible prospect of the result. The creature is, naturally, unhappy with this refusal, and in the quarrel with him Victor manages to shoot Elizabeth by mistake. (She was taking the creature’s side.) We have arrived (finally) in del Toro land, which we may remember from Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) or Nightmare Alley (2021). This is a place where self-deception is hard to distinguish from fraud, where people seek to know, to borrow the title of del Toro’s Oscar-winning movie, ‘the shape of water’. Or, to stay with a phrase from the same film, ‘the truth of these facts’.

It is time to head for the icy landscape we have already seen. But not before an appropriate quotation from the other Shelley: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Meanwhile everyone in the movie agrees that the real monster is the monster’s father. Or his boss, or his dictator. There are many roles in life that involve making others disappear.