Young Australian star Jacob Elordi doesn’t look much like Boris Karloff. His casting as the monster is one of the most disarming aspects of Guillermo del Toro’s bold, visually stunning but frequently jarring rework of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Mexican director has chosen to emphasise the romanticism at the expense of the horror. Elordi plays the creature as a misunderstood, James Dean-like outsider with Oedipal issues rather than as an agent of evil and chaos. Even if his face and torso are latticed with suitably grotesque scars, staples and stitches, he is not only the most sympathetic character in the movie but the best-looking one too. It’s left to Oscar Isaac to provide the real villainy as the brilliant but egomaniacal scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who “fathers” the monster but then promptly disowns him.
Audiences are already so steeped in Frankenstein myth that it’s doubtful they can watch this film with innocent eyes. They have had the Universal movies; Mel Brooks’ classic spoof Young Frankenstein; the Hammer horrors; Kenneth Branagh’s blunt Nineties stab at the material; Yorgos Lanthimos’s similarly themed Alasdair Gray adaptation, Poor Things, and even Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. This may well be a far more faithful interpretation of the novel than most of its predecessors, but that doesn’t mean it can exorcise their memory.
