The Madness of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
- Dan Johnson
- 2 days ago
- 15 min read
Updated: 22 hours ago
The Unique Cinematic Style of Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro once described making movie adaptations in this way. He explained that the process is akin to alchemical transmutation, like asking a fish to sprout legs and grow lungs to adapt to life on land. The magic is to create a new living creature, not a taxidermy of the source material. His latest film, Frankenstein, is an adaptation of one of the books most close to his heart, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. And in his hands, he reimagines a classic much closer to Shelley's original text than many previous film versions, while doing so in a way that could only be described as the most del Toro movie he has ever made.
That's perhaps because he has stated that elements of Frankenstein have guided his imagination since even before he knew how to hold a camera. Themes in Shelley's book, the hubris that often accompanies creation, Romantic beauty in death, imperfect fathers and imperfect children, redemption and forgiveness, questions about what defines a human or the cost of discovery, these have all been themes he's played with in many of his previous movies. In many ways, he's been waiting to grow in his craft until he was finally able to realize his vision fully. And in doing so, he may have made his masterpiece, a film to surpass even The Shape of Water or Pinocchio.
One way in which he pays homage to the books is in the framing device used to to tell his story.
A Danish expedition to the North pole, whose ship, The Horisont, has seized in the frozen waters, finds a lone man near a dog sled and their captain takes him in. As the crew returns to the ship, with the frail survivor in tow, they are confronted with a hulking figure, and the ship's crew, under orders from their Captain Anderson, open fire on the figure. The man, almost as big as a bear, seems to take several gunshots with no sign of slowing down, and the carnage he wreaks on the Danish crew is substantial and brutal until Captain Anderson uses his last remaining shot of his blunderbus to shoot the ice under the figure's feet. His own weight fragments his once steady ground, and the massive figure slips into the icy waters below. Captain Anderson believes that the huge figure must have drowned in the icy dark. The rescued man is nursed back to life, and he recounts his story, the cautionary tale of the once proud Victor Frankenstein.
Encountering Victor Frankenstein: A Pivotal Moment
What then unfolds is a masterful retelling of a story we all know, recast in typical del Toro's maximalist visual language. Young Victor loses his loving mother, who dies in labor while giving birth to his brother William.
Victor is subsequently raised by the harsh, loveless father Leopold Frankenstein, an eminent surgeon and cruel disciplinarian. At one point, Leopold stops switching his son's hands, as they may one day be his instruments as a doctor, and instead strikes his face, since marring it would only impact his vanity, not his utility. It's this brutal crafting of progeny to live on as legacy, whose very name implies and demands success and dominance, that lays the foundation for the man that Victor becomes. He's beset by wild visions of the promise of conquering death, holy visions rich in Catholic imagery of fiery angelic statues come to life. It's here that Victor dedicates himself to becoming the doctor that masters death, the one thing his father was unable to do.
When next we meet an adult Victor, played with manic intensity by Oscar Isaac, he's defending himself at an inquiry by the Royal College of Medicine, defiantly demonstrating the reanimation of a corpse torso and head grafted to an arm from a second corpse.
His grisly exhibition, instead of convincing the academics of the value of his inquiries, instead forces them to react with revulsion and recriminations that what he's assembled is an unholy abomination, not medicine. While he's run out of academic circles, his display catches the attention of a financial backer, a former army surgeon who made his fortunes as an arms dealer.
Heinrich Harlander (played by Christoph Waltz), uncle to William's fiancé Lady Elizabeth Harlander (played by Mia Goth), offers Victor practically limitless funding to continue his work. Harlander provides the location for Victor's laboratory, a water treatment public works project left abandoned before completion due to its vicinity to a prior war's battlegrounds. It's here that Victor, now enabled by new funding, rededicates himself to finding a way to continue his experiments. With Harlander's coffers open to him, he is able to select criminals set to be hanged as potential bodies for his gruesome experiments, and the tower of the water treatment plant is soon transformed into his sanctum, no cost spared in providing the necessary equipment for his project. At one point, he rejects a contractors' equipment because it is made with an alloy, not pure silver like his specs had requested.
Forged by a Cruel Father
Del Toro and Isaac's version of Victor is brash, brilliant, boastful, and absolutely has no time for ethical quandaries.
The beauty of Isaac's portrayal is that he personifies the idea that genius and madness often go hand in hand, while not simply devolving into a caricature of a mad scientist. This Victor is absolutely driven by his desire to crack the secrets of life and death, manic in his quest, at times not sleeping or eating as he rushes headlong into his work. And as is sometimes the case with manic-depressives, his mania is accompanied by visions and delusions of grandeur. Del Toro said in an GQ interview with Isaac, his version of Frankenstein is decidedly not anti-science but instead anti-hubris. Isaac plays Victor as a man who, having been mistreated by his father, sees himself as deserving every accolade due to him. In del Toro and Isaac’s interview, they both explain that one of the themes they wanted to play with is that children who are hurt by their fathers often see themselves as the victims, and only realize they they are repeating the cycle as they become flawed parents themselves, then inflicting their version of harm unto a new generation.
This cycle of imperfect fathers and imperfect sons, the main thrust of Pinocchio, is here again explored. Del Toro explained that the role of patriarchal figures blind to their own failings, while perhaps found in every culture, is a driving characteristic of many Latino fathers.
Biology, Beauty, and Brutality
Victor meets and becomes entranced by Elizabeth, his soon-to-be sister-in-law; her fascination into biological sciences seems to be a perfect compliment to his experiments.
In their first exchange, Elizabeth states, “Ideas are not worthwhile by themselves, I don’t believe… Honor, country, valor. These surely are worthwhile ideas by themselves, wouldn’t you agree? And nevertheless men are dying for them, in a decidedly un-elevated way, face down in the mud, choking on blood, screaming in pain. Men that were fathers, brothers, or sons to someone out there.”
In Elizabeth, del Toro voices similar themes he had earlier played with in his film Pinocchio, a decidedly anti-war and anti-fascist film. Through the counterpoint of Elizabeth, del Toro asks us to consider the human cost of discovery, the human cost of war, and how those in power who make such decisions rarely pay the brutal cost themselves. Isaac’s Victor doesn’t think twice about the people whose bodies he will use in his experiments.
Victor tasks his brother William with supervising construction on the lab, while simultaneously romancing Elizabeth and spending time in gardens and dances with her. And for her part, Elizabeth is at first entranced by this man who responds to her inquisitive nature and love of entomology.
At one point, Victor shows Elizabeth the exposed spine of a body he's been working on, and she is fascinated by the beauty of the symmetry of the neural network, marveling at the handiwork of God. It's her insight into the symmetry of nature that gives Victor the final inspiration for his efforts to activate the lymphatic system. But it's also Elizabeth's decision to remain with William instead of Victor that compels him to redouble his energies into his new promethean project. The final critical push is Harlander's news that with the war approaching a nearing end, his financial resources will soon face a different headwind and the window of opportunity is closing if they are to succeed.
Final Resourcefulness of Victor and Harlander
Victor and Harlander visit the frozen battlefields, combing through the corpses of soldiers for viable bodies, their parts to be reassembled in Victor's creature.
He meticulously scrounges for the best body parts from the fresh cadavers, surgically severing limbs and reassembling tendons in a bloody and gruesome hurried attempt. Harlander documents the process extensively with both handwritten notes and the newly emergent technology of photography. Just when Victor is about ready to complete his work, Harlander explains the cost of their Faustian bargain: Harlander is dying of syphilis and demands that it's his essence that is used to animate Victor's assembled body. Victor points out that his body is tainted with the disease, and using his body would likewise taint his creation, and so Victor refuses. Victor begins the final assembly of the lighting rods that will power his machines, and Harlander refuses to take no for an answer. The two fight over the remaining silver rod, and in the storm-drenched scuffle, Harlander loses his footing and plunges to his death below. Victor proceeds unswayed, and as the storm crescendos, the huge capacitors in his lab surge to life.
The Creature
As del Toro frames the scene, the body of the creature is shown upright, arms splayed out in an intentional visual nod to a crucified Christ.
Once the chestpiece on the creature is activated by a lightning strike, Victor lowers the body back to a horizontal position. After what first appears to be a failure, Victor drapes himself over the chest of the assembled body and pounds on his chest in frustration. He then goes to his bedchamber, exhausted and defeated, and has another vision of the fiery angel. Del Toro’s imagery in Victor’s bedchamber, with silk sheets vibrant red, recalls the same vibrant red Victor’s mother once wore, an echoing visual reminder of what started this obsession in conquering death. In the morning, the creature awakens Victor, alive after all, newly born, and fumbling in his steps like a baby fawn.
Victor leads the lumbering giant, played by Jacob Elordi, to a lower chamber in the tower, teaching him his name "Victor," and slowly inspecting the now animated being. He is huge with a pearly blue-white body, almost reminiscent of Bernini marble sculptures, visibly assembled from parts, but no stitching evident.
At first, Victor is fascinated by his victory over death, but soon becomes disillusioned by the creature's apparent slowness of mind. Despite every effort, the creature's only utterance is "Victor." And in evidence of his future treatment of his creation, Victor manacles the creature and leaves him, chained and alone. The way Isaac plays him here is almost like a form of post-partum depression, despondent as to what to do now post-creation, a low that follows the high of a bipolar swing. In his narrative voice over, Victor states, “I never considered what would come after creation. And having reached the edge of the earth, there was no horizon left. The achievement felt unnatural. Void of meaning.”
The one who cried Monster
Meanwhile, Elizabeth is concerned that she hasn't heard from her uncle, and she convinces William to visit the water works laboratory. Victor lies and claims Harlander is elsewhere and will return shortly. Victor is still manic, nearly feverish, and is insistent on showing William and Elizabeth his notes and apparent success. Elizabeth is fascinated by the creature, much like she has been with other anatomy and biology of the natural world, and is horrified, not with the creature, but with Victor's treatment of him, leaving him chained and alone. Her fascination with the creature provides him a measure of kindness for the first time in his life; a later interaction has the creature delight in showing Elizabeth the leaf boats he's made that follow the channel down the drains of the waterworks.
Victor continues to try to teach the creature language and soon becomes distraught at what he now sees as a botched attempt, a mistake, and a failure. He begins to clean up the refuse of the bodies left behind in the wake of his work, carelessly stuffing heads, limbs, and torsos into gunny sacks and dumping them down the waterworks chutes, useless detritus after they are no longer needed. He tries once again to teach the creature to say something other than "Victor," and after he is frustrated once more, he walks away, only to hear the creature whisper "Elizabeth."
This triggers a new angry bout of jealousy in Victor. He confides in William that Harlander is dead, supposedly killed by the creature in a fit of rage, and suggests that the best thing for Elizabeth would be for them to both leave the lab, before she realizes what has happened to her uncle. William and Elizabeth leave, and Victor begins to douse the tower in the kerosene that had fueled his electrical engines, planning to destroy all evidence of his project. Elizabeth, concerned about the creature's well-being under Victor's care, is convinced Victor is planning to kill him, and she demands that William turn the carriage around so they can return to the lab.
The couple return just in time to witness the conflagration, and they rescue Victor, who had been thrown by the explosions and whose right leg was nearly blown off. Meanwhile, the creature, afraid of the flames, strains against the bars holding his shackles in place. He manages to break free and narrowly escapes down the out-bound drainage just seconds before the flames follow.
A Child in a World of Violence
One of the things that is amazing about how del Toro structures the movie is that at this point, we return again to the framing story, where Victor lies in the Captain’s quarters in the heart of The Horisont, recounting the tale thus far. But his tale is interrupted by the creature, who did not die in the ice, but instead has made his way onto the ship. And here, the last third of the movie is told from the creature’s perspective. We discover he, too, survived the tower’s collapse. He finds himself on the outflow of the drainworks and stumbles through the corpse remnants from both Victor’s lab and the remains of previous battlegrounds. Struck by the cold, he clothes himself with a cloak taken from a dead soldier, and, child-like, begins to explore his surroundings. He sees a stag, approaches him, the deer feeding on some berries. The creature reaches out and eats some berries himself, visibly enjoying his first taste of fresh fruit. He reaches his hand out to the deer, offering it some more of the berries, only to witness the deer shot right in front of him by a pair of hunters. The hunters soon open fire on him as well, and the creature is forced to go on the run. Having evaded the hunters, the creature then finds shelter in what appears to be an abandoned cottage, making himself a small warm nest in the gear house of the cottage’s mill. When the family that owns the cottage returns, it’s kinsmen to the hunters he had met in the woods earlier: a man, his wife, a child, and a kindly old man, the grandfatherly patriarch of this family.
Hidden in the eves of the gear house, the creature experiences the closest thing he’s ever felt to kinship and family, even if only vicariously. As the old man tutors his granddaughter in reading, the creature also listens and learns as well. He quickly realizes that the family has needs for firewood and other practical necessities to survive, and under the cover of darkness, he gathers all the firewood they could need. The old man refers to these as gifts from the spirit of the forest, and is grateful for the kindness.
At one point, the family’s sheep are attacked by a pack of wolves, and the hunters do their best to kill as many of the wolves as possible to defend their flock. Here, the creature remarks on the ferocity of the wolves, recognizing that the hunters do not hate the wolves any more than the wolves hate the sheep, but he muses that the natural order of things is brutal and violent. As the family begins to make plans to leave for the winter and the hunters plan to track down the wolf pack, the old man insists on staying behind by himself.
After the rest of the family leaves, the old man calls out to the creature, whom he has taken to likely be a defector from the battlefield. Though blind, he feels the creature's face, and sensing the scars, he remarks that he must have had a painful life before here. The old man shares his lodging and simple foodstuff, but more importantly, he opens up to the creature as a friend, offering him companionship for the first time in his short life.
Briefly, the creature grows in curiosity, learning to read the meager library the old man has assembled, and as such he continues to grow in intelligence. Haunted by memories, like brief dreams, of many men, of fire and water, and of a single word, “Victor,” he decides he must investigate his own origins.
A Journey Through the Beginning of the End
The creature parts from the old man and makes his way to the ruins of the water works, where he discovers the remains of Victor’s lab and the surviving bits of his notes, finally understanding how he was made.
He returns to the cottage, only to see that the wolves have circled back and attacked the old man. The creature fights them off, but the old man is dying. The creature explains that he finally understands what he is, the child of a monstrous charnel house. The old man counters with his understanding that what stands before him is a good man and a loyal friend.
As the old man is dying, the hunters, who had been tracking the wolves, return and mistakenly think the creature was the cause of the old man’s death. They open fire on the creature, who kills one of the hunters and then retreats. Slowed by his injuries, the creature takes several shots, one to his head, and he collapses on the ground.
The creature doesn’t know how long he remained dormant, but eventually he wakes up again, healed, unable to die, and now insisting on meeting his creator Victor. The creature tracks down Victor to his family’s estate, where William is preparing for his wedding to Elizabeth. The creature confronts Victor, demanding that he use the same process used to make him to make a companion for him. Victor refuses stating, “I have found sanity at such a cost, and you here are madness calling me back.” It’s worthy to note that as Victor replies, “I will never make something like you, wicked and deformed,” del Toro frames the shot so that Victor is looking into a full body mirror, and in doing so, implies that the flaws he sees in the creature are simply the result of the flaws in himself.
Rebuffed, the creature angrily throws Victor across the bedchambers and draws the attention of Elizabeth, who is obviously pleased to see he survived the waterworks destruction after all. Victor reaches for his pistol and warns Elizabeth to step away from the creature. Instead, she lunges in the way to protect the creature, and is mistakenly shot by Victor. William and the wedding guests enter the room, and Victor accuses the creature of attacking Elizabeth. The creature defends himself and tosses William across the bedchamber, smashing his head on the furniture.
As the creature departs, with Elizabeth in his arms, Victor tends to his dying brother, who confesses he’d always feared Victor, accusing him to be the source of every madness and destruction. Del Toro is not subtle here, hammering home the message in William’s dying words, “You are the monster.”
The creature takes Elizabeth into a small cave in the woods nearby, and as she lies dying, she confesses that she was never of this world and that it’s better to go this way, to fade with his eyes gazing upon her, their brief but beautiful connection a real love made eternal. Afterwards, the creature retreats and is hunted by Victor, relentlessly, across forest and mountains, until they are in the frozen lands where the movie begins. The creature eventually confronts Victor, and in a fit of melancholic desire for self-destruction, he demands that Victor light a stick of dynamite to try to kill him, but warns him that if this doesn’t work, he’ll come back for Victor.
The dynamite blows, bringing us full circle to the opening scenes of the movie, and del Toro brings us back to the framing device, the creature in the captain’s quarters of the ship, confronting Victor one last time. It is only here, as Victor lies dying, that he finally sees the creature for what he is, a son and a living being full of pain and suffering.
He asks for forgiveness and begs the creature to forgive himself into existence, with one final dying wish, “Say my name. My father gave me that name and it meant nothing. Now I ask you to give it back to me, one last time. The way you said it at the beginning, when it meant the world to you.” The creature forgives him and gives him a gentle kiss goodbye as Victor fades away, hoping that maybe now, when all is said and done, perhaps the two of them can finally be human. The creature leaves the captains’ quarters, and under the protection of Captain Anderson from his men, the creature departs the ship. In his final act of forgiveness, the creature wrenches the ship free from the ice, and those who had at the outset of the film opened fire on him now set sail for home. The closing shot of the film shows a towering creature, alone, staring off into the arctic sun.
Fifty Years for One Perfect Story
It’s a beautiful film, full of the pathos and humanity that del Toro has often brought monsters in his prior works. Tellingly, in interviews, del Toro refuses to call Elordi’s character “Frankenstein’s Monster,” instead referring to him always as “the creature.” It may have taken him 50 years to tackle his version of Frankenstein, but we should all be grateful he waited to this point in his life to craft a story full of hubris and madness, pain and loneliness, love and tenderness, and above all, forgiveness to those who have hurt us the most.
[All images from IMDB]