Guillermo del Toro successfully respects the tradition’s tropes while bringing enough of a fresh sensibility to captivate a general audience in Frankenstein, finds Mark Dee Smith
Mary Shelley’s epistolary novel Frankenstein is a cornerstone in the development of the contemporary imagination and arguably the birthplace of the ‘science fiction’ genre. It begins:
‘The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence… I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors.’
A generation before HG Wells and Jules Verne, this was the first fantastic fiction that sought to stay within the realm of the possible. Mary Shelley was the daughter of proto-feminist and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft and lover of Romantic poet and political radical Percy Bysshe Shelley. But these firebrand credentials are dwarfed by the global and historic impact of her 1818 novel.
A collision between notions of self-development rooted in the German bildungsroman and the deep anxieties rendered by scientific and urban growth, it’s a crash course in modernity and its discontents presented as a fable providing a literary corollary to the Luddite revolts that marked the period.
Frankenstein and its tropes can be found in every aspect of mass culture and the book itself has been in print for over two centuries. Whenever we talk about monstering the other, we are alluding to Mary Shelley.
Guillermo del Toro is one of those rare filmmakers who manages to please cinephiles and still keep the Hollywood studios onside. This is no small feat, now or ever. More distinctively, the Oscar-winning del Toro is committed to non-realist genres – horror, fantasy, superheroes – but always seeks the inclusion of radical and socio-critical themes in his work.
This is seen most vividly in his Spanish Civil War allegory Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), but also prevalent in his recent adaption of Pinocchio (2022). Here del Toro invites close comparison with the English writer Angela Carter.
So what to do with a tale and characters as familiar in parodic form as in the original? This is a del Toro film which means it’s captured by an astonishing visual sumptuousness, maintaining the flow (not to mention, budget-access) established by his partnership with Netflix. The child-like fairytale gaze is sustained too with monster’s arc from laboratory to arctic wasteland seen from the twin perspectives of creator and creation.
The high gothic style – Tim Burton on steroids – is contrasted with mute classicism of a stellar cast including Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the much-vaunted ‘hot’ monster. Mia Goth doubles as Elizabeth Lavenza and Baroness Frankenstein, and it’s her role that heightens the film’s philosophical aspects
Similarly satisfying for Counterfire readers is the pronounced but unsententious anti-imperialist theme that undercuts the more typical “science is bad” reading.
Del Toro has successfully completed the high-wire act of respecting the tradition’s tropes while bringing enough of a fresh sensibility to captivate a general audience; this isn’t just for geeks.
Galvanised by del Toro’s astonishing passion, this lavish spectacle stands confidently beside the finest cinematic expressions of Mary Shelley’s dark parable: James Whale’s Frankenstein, The Spirit of the Beehive and the magisterial Bride of Frankenstein. Go see.
Frankenstein is available on Netflix
