Director Guillermo del Toro is an auteur. His films are immersive experiences into worlds that include a touch of horror and fantasy. The film has set pieces of beauty and spectacle. Del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water garnered him an academy award. His new film Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac (Dune, Ex Machina) as Dr Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the monster, in this reimagining of the 1818 classic Gothic novel by Mary Shelley.
But since this is a del Toro creation, as the Netflix film unfolds, you find yourself questioning who, in fact, the monster really is – Frankenstein or his creation?
That the rising star and current heartthrob Jacob Elordi, a 6’5″ Australian hunk, as the monster initially seemed like a mistake - until you see the “monster” through the director’s gaze.
Frankenstein is the tale of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature from body parts. In our current social climate, where billionaire boys rule the world – reaping gigantic profits while the middle class is squeezed out of work by artificial intelligence and safety nets for society wither – del Toro shows us a man obsessed solely with his private goals, with no concern for the havoc wrought in attempting to attain them. Many classic themes run through the retelling of Frankenstein, including the father-son dynamic, but the heartbeat of del Toro’s vision is that the ugly can be beautiful and the beautiful can be evil.
At seven years old, the Mexican director saw the 1931 Boris Karloff/James Whale cinema expression of the Frankenstein story. He was 11 years old when he read Frankenstein: “It had a profoundly religious effect on me. I was raised Catholic, but in reading Frankenstein I found my true religion. I understood, because of Karloff’s interpretation, what a martyr and a messiah meant. I said to myself, ‘that’s me’. I realised that the movie wasn’t the same as the book. There was a lot to tackle in the original – like the humanity of the creature and the inhumanity of the world. The Romantics believed the enemy was life.”
Without alluding to the reasons he identified with those themes, del Toro hints at a complicated relationship with his father. “I thought, I’d like to make a movie about my relationship with my father back then, at 11 years old. Then, as I became a father, I thought about the relationships between my father and I, and myself and my kid.” The curly and grey-haired director with his iconic outsized glasses laughs: “Eventually, I settled on forgiveness and acceptance.” The poignancy of his words is ameliorated with humour. “That happened [became a father] after I turned 50.” He interlocks his fingers over his belly and laughs self-depreciatingly. “When things start to fall apart, you start to reflect.”
Del Toro wrote the screenplay with Oscar Isaac in mind. The film ended the book as Shelly had centuries ago, with creation and the resolution. But the director struggled with the in-between scenes until he fixed on the analogy of children leaving home and returning to tell their parents of their adventures. “As a father, you watch your children go out into the world. You know little about their experiences after that until they come back and tell you what happened to them and why,” says Del Toro. “Knowing that the end of the film would be about forgiveness and acceptance became the ribbon that ran through the script.”
Mia Goth who portrays Dr. Frankenstein’s love interest, Elizabeth Lorenza, even though she’s betrothed to his brother, said the script resonated with her. “There’s a sense that she feels like an outsider, but with a longing to connect. She’s searching for a home,” says Goth. “The script writing was beautiful.”
Elordi spoke about the essence of the film’s visceral emotion: “Every word said by the ”creature" was something that I asked myself.” The lanky actor speaks with visible glee and a slight Australian twang about his role. “In the film, I get to play Job asking God, ‘Why?’. There was a line in the script that I’ve never said before when the ‘creature’ looks at Victor Frankenstein, pulls the mask down and says, ‘now run’. When I read that, I heard drums in my head. I knew in that moment, I had to accept the part.”
Isaac speaks about the themes that resonate with individual truths. “At the end of the film, the question changes from ‘why?’ to ‘how?’ – from ‘why are we alive?’ to ‘how should we live?’ It’s the question of this moment in our history,” the actor says. “I asked Guillermo at one point: ‘Is it weird that I find it so much fun and so enjoyable to do this even though the film is so dark and cruel?’ His reply was interesting. He said: ‘Maybe it’s because you’re playing someone who has no doubts.’ Personally, I’m filled with doubts, so it was an escape to be somebody who’s doubtless about what they want to do... to the point of blindness.”
Del Toro adds, “Every tyrant in the history of mankind is devoid of doubt and thinks of himself as a victim. That’s a constant. They say: ‘Oh, poor me, poor me.’ And they’re monsters.”
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