Over two hundred years since it was written, Mary Shelley's masterpiece, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, remains one of the absolute classics of literature. Launching, effectively, both horror and science fiction as the genres they are today with a single novel, it's also a speculative exploration on the moralities of accelerating scientific progress.
For the past 96 years, of course, the most famous portrayal of Frankenstein's Monster was Boris Karloff's, with his iconic flat brow and neck-bolts, here portraying the creature as a mute, unintelligent brute. In 1994, Kenneth Branagh made a more faithful adaptation, with himself as the doctor and Robert De Niro as the creature. I suspect that this film was made in the wake of Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula," which had come out two years prior, and which sought to be a more faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel (hence the use of his name in the title of the film). Branagh's adaptation was "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," in the same format.
I've often said that I think Del Toro loves monsters the way a child loves a teddy bear. He clearly has a great affection for them. As we saw in his Oscar-winning riff on Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Shape of Water, he transforms the amphibious creature from a rapacious menace into something graceful, romantic, and possibly divine.
His Frankenstein - an inevitable project when considering his body of work - makes adaptational changes to the novel to reinforce this affection: Shelley's creature (whom I like to refer to as Adam, though I don't think he's ever given a proper name, except maybe being Victor Junior) does commit murder in his rage against his neglectful master. Despite these acts, Adam is still more sympathetic than his creator, who callously tosses him aside when he realizes the enormity of his magnum opus, and refuses to do anything to ease Adam's crippling loneliness.
The film reshuffles some of its plot elements, painting both a more sympathetic version of Adam (Jacob Elordi) and a more damning one of Victor (Oscar Isaac).
Actually, when the story-within-a-story begins, we get a rather sympathetic view of Victor in his childhood - he has a loving mother, but a distant father (played by Charles Dance, who has a lot of experience playing a shitty father). Both a Baron and a renowned doctor, Victor's father trains his son in medical science, but in a manner that is just straight-up abusive, physically striking him when he fails to remember the purpose of some piece of anatomy when he's maybe ten years old.
Victor's ailing mother dies when she goes into labor with his little brother William, and while it's not explicitly confirmed, it seems that Victor believes that his father erred on saving the baby over his mother (caesarian deliveries used to be very deadly for the mother).
This cycle of abuse is very much what the film focuses on. Unlike in the novel, Victor's immediate reaction to his creation's awakening is not one of sudden terror and loathing. Initially, he's overjoyed (especially because the entire venture looked like it had been sabotaged by circumstance). It's when Adam is slow to progress, unable to say anything other than his creator's name, that he becomes resentful and fears that his grand project was a failure. He stops looking to his creation with any kindness or enthusiasm.
In the novel, Elizabeth is a childhood friend of Victor's whom he eventually seeks to marry, only for her to be killed by Adam before the wedding. Here, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is initially betrothed to his brother William (Felix Kammerer,) and not long after Adam's creation, she finds and befriends the creature, seeing him as the conscious, intelligent being that he is, rather than the "it" that Victor believes him to be.
Del Toro presents an Adam who is not just extremely resilient, but truly invincible, granted a regenerative ability on top of his hardiness that allows him to survive holding an exploding stick of dynamite, among other injuries. Victor's aim in his research is to fully defeat death itself, but in creating a truly immortal being, there is no means by which to undo his creation, nor any way for Adam to escape the pains of life.
While the novel has an Adam who is bent on revenge, tormenting Victor by slaying those around him, this film's version is nearly a perfect innocent - he does kill some people, but only in self-defense (sure, you could argue that an unkillable being can't kill in self-defense). The people around Victor who die are either killed by accident, or by Victor's own hand (and Victor multiple times blames Adam for deaths he has caused).
Victor ultimately, in this film, is someone who passes on the abuse that he received as a child. There's a popular saying: "Hurt people hurt people," and Victor surely seems to be an example of that. He is, also, someone who displays narcissistic tendencies, struggling to see others around him (not just Adam) as real people with all the inner life that he possesses.
It is Adam, the Creature, who has and seems to take the opportunity to bring the cycle of abuse to an end. Though he must soldier on with no end to his life, within that lack of closure, he has the opportunity to grow and become a far better man than his creator ever was.
As a minor note, the movie bumps the setting up to the 1850s (the novel was published in 1818) and has Victor study medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland. I recently watched the video series An Agony of Effort, by Charred Thermos, which analyzes the game Bloodborne as an extensive allegory for the development of modern medicine in the 19th century. Edinburgh was a real center of that research at the time, which also made it a hotbed for grave-robbing "Resurrectionists" that sold cadavers to medical researchers. In the film, Victor uses the impunity of money and aristocracy to quite overtly claim the remains of the executed or battle-slain, but it's a keen era in which to set the story.
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