A few years back, Netflix chief Ted Sarandos asked Guillermo del Toro what films were still on his bucket list. The director had a quick answer: “Pinocchio and Frankenstein.”
“Do it,” Sarandos replied. That greenlight led to del Toro’s Oscar-winning Pinocchio in 2022. Now comes the bigger, riskier dream project: Frankenstein.
The film, which premiered this week at the Venice Film Festival, is one of the event’s main attractions. Del Toro has been chasing it for decades.
“It’s more than a dream, almost a religion for me since I was a kid,” he told reporters. His love for the story goes back to Boris Karloff’s 1931 monster, though del Toro says he waited until the right conditions made it possible to tell the tale on a grand scale. Now that it’s finished, he jokes he’s in “postpartum depression.”
A monster cast
This time, Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein. Euphoria actor Jacob Elordi, almost unrecognizable, takes on the role of the creature.
Andrew Garfield was originally cast as the monster but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts caused by the Hollywood actors’ strike. Elordi joined with only three weeks to prepare.
“It felt monumental,” Elordi said. “But Guillermo had already set the table. I just had to sit down and join the banquet. It was a dream come true.”
Isaac described the collaboration with del Toro as total immersion: “I just hooked myself into Guillermo, and we flung ourselves down the well. I can’t believe we got here.”
Three-part story
The movie runs 149 minutes and is split into a prelude and two overlapping versions of the story one from Frankenstein’s point of view, the other from his creation’s.
It shows the scientist’s troubled childhood and what drove him to create life, but it also emphasizes the creature’s suffering and mistreatment.
Mixed reviews in Venice
Early reactions have been divided. Deadline called it “del Toro’s sandbox… irresistible,” while The Independent dismissed it as “all show and little substance.” The Hollywood Reporter praised it as “one of del Toro’s finest,” and Total Film gave it four stars, calling it “masterfully concocted… with awards legs.”
Monsters with heart
Del Toro, who won Oscars for The Shape of Water in 2018, has always had a soft spot for creatures. In Frankenstein, he wanted the monster to feel “newborn” and beautiful, rather than grotesque.
The production leaned heavily on practical sets and costumes. Christoph Waltz joked, “CGI is for losers,” as del Toro explained that real locations help actors deliver stronger performances.
While some critics see parallels with today’s debates over artificial intelligence, del Toro insists that wasn’t his intention. Instead, he says the film wrestles with Mary Shelley’s original question: what does it mean to be human?
“We live in a time of terror and intimidation,” he said. “The answer, which art is part of, is love. The movie shows imperfect characters and the right we have to remain imperfect.”
