JACOB ELORDI IN FRANKENSTEIN

A hypertrophied but holy Creature feature

Guillermo del Toro's passion-project Frankenstein has two notable features: it has the handsomest Creature since Warhol and it was very expensive. With being expensive, it's very pretty. But should Victor Frankenstein's lab be a towering palace? No, all the money and time del Toro spent leads to an over-elaborateness at every point that detracts completely from the atmosphere of obsessive genius and makes Victor instead more of an empresario - like a successful and ambitious filmmaker.

This is not to say the film doesn't bring us Mary Shelley's classic tale. And in fact it is more true to the original than almost any other movie version, if still not precisely accurate, for necessary reasons. This is a pretty wonderful and glorious screen version of the monster horror tale of creation, jealousy, and scientific hubris. It just happens to overdo everything at every point. This is an important story, an essential lesson, ever new and significant. It is as germane to our romanticism as to our sense of the grotesque. And we should be grateful that del Toro has put passion into his film as well as money and technology.

Del Toro has delved deeply into family trauma for the essence of his interpretation, for the failure of Victor's relationship with his creation/creature is to be traced to his cruel father, Leopold Frankenstein (a forbidding Charles Dance), which causes the aduilt Victor (Oscar Isaac, good, but a little underwhelming) to be distant and mean to his needy fledgling Creature (Jacob Elordi, both the visual and thespian highlight of the whole film) and to alienate him. He doesn't even refer to the Creature as "him" as does the sympathetic Elizabeth (Mia Goth, not at all as bad as I'd been led to assume) - but as "it." His contempt for and horror of what he has done is utterly distressing. That the film can make us feel things like that so clearly is a mark of Del Toro's achievement, of how he makes the whole story come to life.

Given his approach, it's essential, and we understand eventually, that del Toro must spend a lot of time on the childhood of Victor Frankenstein (with Christian Convery as the troubled boy) and on his younger brother William (German actor Felix Kammerer, who has rawness and sensitivity). But still, things really begin when we get to Jacob Elordi's Creature one hour in. We are watching the subtlest example of elaborate twenty-first century film makeup artistry. There are stories of the unimaginable numbers of hours Elordi spent being fitted with a complete body suit made up of tectonic plates to convey convincingly how the Creature was pieced together out of separate charnel house body parts. (Ironically, many critics have condemned this film itself as one that "reassembles a multitude of fragments," consisting of too many parts collaged together with impressive skill but no unifying tone.)

I confess such things as state-of-the-art body makeup leave me a little cold in technical terms. But the important thing is the ritual. Such a role isn't just casually taken on, but assumed formally as a sacred rite and transformative ordeal. Elordi has explicitly mentioned studying the Japanese ritual dance form of Butoh as an inspiration for the Creature's movements and physicality. Everyone said at once that the great performance in the film was Jacob Elordi's as the Creature, and rightly so. Elordi has tended to seem a somewhat superficial actor up to now, even as Elvis (who also probably can be seen in terms of Butoh). He seems to have found himself, and, hidden under ten hours of makeup, given the best performance of his career.

For all the body makeup, we have to go back to see what was there, because the effect is understated, and a mark of the quality of del Toro's and Elordi's Creature is that what we remember is the face, and it's not a grotesque face at all. But Elordi contributes to the impressiveness of the Creature by being 6'5", which towers over Isaac's 5'9".

All very interesting, you may say, but does this Frankenstein match the sadness and loneliness of the Creature of the early films? No, probably not. But del Toro's $120 million budget is something he is prepared to make us see. While the Baron's lab is overblown, I'm nothing but admiration at the frame setting of the ice-blocked ship in the Arctic. This Creature as has been noted has superhero strengths. And so when he sets the ship free, he rocks it loose with a simple push. The crafts people have constructed an amazing ship, as they constructed an amazing Tower. The film-studio ship, the Horisont, is so deftly mounted that the Creature can actually, physically set it free from the movie ice. He pushes the ship out of the ice, which allows the crew to journey home, and then leaves to watch the sunrise, having reconciled with his creator, Victor. And del Toro has given us a happy ending for these parlous times. But it has been the tragedy and horror of Frankenstein's defiance of the gods and his misfired, misfit, lost and lonely creation that have provided us with the emotion, as in every other version.

Frankenstein, 149 mins., premiered at Venice (after Marrakech and Guadalajara), showing also at many other festivals including Toronto, Busan, BFI London, etc. US theatrical release (limited) Oct. 17, 2025. Metacritic rating: 77%.


JACOB ELORDI IN FRANKENSTEIN

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.