It's hardly surprising that Guillermo del Toro, the Oscar-winning director behind such monster-friendly films as The Shape of Water, Pan's Labyrinth, and Hellboy, would eventually take on Frankenstein. Nor is it any surprise that his gothic fright is lavish, luxurious, a Grand Guignol of sumptuously bloody production design. Del Toro has always had an eye for what makes monsters beautiful as well as what makes them terrifying, and his aesthetics have typically been matched by a profound empathy for the misunderstood horrors that haunt his films. In del Toro's horrors, the real monsters are never the actual monsters. The real monsters are fascism, bigotry, oppression, and social shunning. The real monsters are always us.
So it is in his Frankenstein, now on Netflix, which casts the monster as a tender innocent brought into a cruel world by an even crueler man, a father and god figure whose mad ambitions make him more monstrous than his stitched together creation. It's a gorgeous movie, but, like The Shape of Water, it's also a cloying and self-satisfied one. And it comes perilously close to opposing the idea of human progress itself.
