Frankenstein: Is Guillermo del Toro still on the side of the monsters? (critical)

Returning to the literary source of Mary Shelley, del Toro also returns to the level of spectacularity of his biggest films. Can the fantasy blockbuster still have a beating heart?

Man and monster, creator and creature, his creature. Like those of Tim Burton, more or less all of Guillermo del Toro’s films are variations on this one and the same theme, riffs on one and the same parable. Where is the human in all this, towards which the sympathy of the director and that of the public must necessarily lean?

Frankensteinthe gothic novel, the doctor and the gentle monster which bears their name, with a particle emphasizing its nobility (Frankenstein’s monster), it is not only the film that the author of The Shape of Water has always dreamed of doing, but one that he has already done, remade and re-remade, almost every time since his beginnings, from variants to variations, from attempts to allusions. With his last Pinocchiothe track had warmed up again and finally, here it was, the monster movie, the Frankenstein movie, Frankenstein in short.

We announce a budget (monster) of 120 million, and every dollar is there, on the screen of your TV (phone or viewfinder). Surprise, the story does not begin on the heights of a small Bavarian village but on an Arctic ice floe, with a German ship stuck in the ice and an injured scientist who tells the crew why the invincible superman who has just attacked them has tracked him to the ends of the earth.

This prologue is both a return to the literary origins of the myth (this is how Mary Shelley’s novel begins) and a promise that we are going to see what we are going to see: the most enormous version of Frankenstein ever filmed, with Dantesque action scenes, unleashing of graphic violence, breath of adventure cinema and unstoppable creative fury. The reader may see this as good news but he would also do well to be wary.

The Frankenstein myth certainly has its forgotten corners (notably the flashback story carried by two successive narrators, the creator first, before the creature itself), but its theme is known, digested, an integral part of the collective unconscious: a scientist on the verge of madness thinks he is God then abandons his “son” to the hatred of men, before realizing that he is the most human of all.

In a 1h10 haiku (the 1931 version with Boris Karloff, adapted from a 1920s play rather than the original novel), everything was said, for eternity. By doubling the footage and increasing the means tenfold, del Toro increases neither the stakes nor the dimension of the fable, he highlights them, crushes them, threatens to bury them under the weight of redundancy and his own hubris.

He, the man who dedicated his work to being “on the side of the monsters” finds himself here faced with a paradoxical and almost existential observation: the super-powerful Hollywood director that he has become can now only identify with the demiurge deformed by the ambition, the fever, the wide angle and the (complicit) overacting of Oscar Isaac. Does he fully realize it?

The most beautiful scenes (also found in Shelley) bring the creature played by Jacob Elordi back to a state of nature in the middle of the forest, like a new naive Adam or a wild child. For around fifteen minutes, the filmmaker finally shows himself capable of letting his film breathe, implementing the morality and emotion of the fable rather than suffocating them with music, action, visual madness and thematic circumlocution.

THE Frankenstein del Toro has the faults of his qualities. The monster is just one of the many attractions and the human, a distant goal, which he never quite manages to achieve.

By Guillermo del Toro. With Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth… Duration 2 hours 35 minutes. Available November 7 on Netflix