In Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” a Vast Vision Gets Netflixed Down to Size

The first time we encounter the Creature, though, we see almost nothing of him at all: he is a faceless wraith, in a dark cloak and a vengeful mood, coldly pursuing his creator, Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). It’s 1857, and we are somewhere in the Arctic. A ship, bound for the North Pole, is trapped in ice, and its stranded sailors, led by Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen), extend shelter to Victor, who’s badly wounded. Much of this arises from the novel, though Shelley must have left out the part where the Creature kills several sailors with his bare hands and gets blunderbussed off the side of the ship, seemingly to his death. But then, in an exquisitely del Toro touch, the Creature’s skeletal fingers do a spidery tap dance in the snow—a sign that he is about to launch himself back into the fray. In a nice nod to Whale, someone cries out, “It’s still alive!”

Through a stroke of ingenuity, the Creature is temporarily held at bay, granting the frail Victor enough time to regale the good Captain with his life story. In a lengthy flashback, we meet the young Victor (Christian Convery), a sensitive, dark-haired child born to immense privilege but also savage paternal abuse. His father, Baron Leopold Frankenstein (Charles Dance, chillingly reptilian as ever), is a surgeon; he drills his medical expertise into his son and delivers a good thwack when drilling isn’t enough. Victor is far closer to his mother, Claire (Mia Goth), a shyly nurturing soul, though not for long. She dies giving birth to a second son, William, and for Victor, tragedy becomes destiny: he resolves to conquer death, and eclipse his father’s legacy, by learning to create new life. The gentle Convery abruptly ages into Isaac, who steps into the role with the wide-eyed fervor of a man possessed.

One of the tale’s bitterest ironies is that Victor will become a more demanding, more neglectful, and vastly more destructive father figure than Leopold ever was. Del Toro, perpetually attuned to the minutiae of process, turns the sinewy logistics of reanimation into a series of referendums on Victor’s humanity. When he calmly picks his way through freshly fallen corpses on a battlefield, Victor exhibits more than purely scientific detachment; later, you half expect him to whistle while he works, sawing through a cadaver’s limb. God is in the details, and del Toro takes a great deal of pleasure in them; no less than Victor, he is a connoisseur of carnage. Much scholarly attention is also paid to the science of electrical storage, enabling a body to function as a permanently recharged battery, and to the use of an enormous lightning-rod mechanism, which will harness lightning from atop an isolated tower, where Victor conducts his experiments. (The magnificently spiky production design, by Tamara Deverell, has a pronounced case of turrets syndrome.) When the Creature comes astonishingly to life, though not exactly as planned, Victor is entranced for all of about five minutes before seeming to lose interest. He sees only the flaws—and not the strange, unforeseeable miracles—in his design.

Should you miss the sense of family history cruelly replaying itself, here is Mia Goth again, this time playing Elizabeth, the fiancée of Victor’s younger brother, William (Felix Kammerer). When Victor falls in love with her, it’s the film’s sly way of emphasizing his mama’s-boy complex—an Oedipal touch borne out by the exquisite costumes of Kate Hawley, who outfits both Claire and Elizabeth in gowns of striking color and plumage. After Victor imprisons the Creature below stairs, it is Elizabeth who discovers and befriends him, even as she becomes proportionally more disgusted with Victor. Few filmmakers who saw Goth leering amid the carnage of “Pearl” (2022) and “Infinity Pool” (2023) would think to cast her as a woman of decency. But del Toro is playing a tricky, genre-blurring game; he uses the visual language of horror—a form that Goth emblematizes—to push us beyond horror’s expectations.

Throughout the film, del Toro flits and hovers between contradictory ideas, with the restlessness of the beautiful butterflies that Elizabeth, an amateur entomologist, likes to study. Hoping to liberate the Frankenstein myth from the deadening confines of parody and pastiche, del Toro returns to Shelley’s novel with renewed reverence, though few would mistake him for a literary purist. His inventions well up from within the material, but also from within himself; it’s as if he’s fused with the text so closely that the deeper into it he goes, the more personal his deviations and embellishments become. There’s a recurring image of an angel, resplendent in red, who haunts Victor’s childhood dreams. A Catholic tableau come to fiery life, she’s a classic del Toro image, reminiscent of the winged seraphs in “Cronos” (1992) and “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (2008).