Venice 2025: the Frankenstein of Del Toro is very beautiful but lacks a bit of soul
The Mexican director presented, in competition at the Mostra, his long fantasized Frankenstein, finally funded by Netflix.
We were talking about dream films yesterday, on the occasion of the projection at the Mostra ofNo other choicethe adaptation of Cleaver From Donald Westlake, which Park Chan-Wook ruminated for almost twenty years. The Venetian festival unveiled another of these sea snakes in the process that ended up emerging on the surface: the Frankenstein From Guillermo Del Toro, to whom the director says he has thought since he started to do cinema-that is to say for over thirty years.
It was Netflix who finally gave the filmmaker of The shape of the water the means of his ambitions, just after having helped him to concretize another of his dream projects, Pinocchioreleased on the platform in 2022. The two films obviously dialogue, first because these are two stories of creatures going on an adventure by wondering why their creator gave them life, and also because they have both been told a thousand times, and that it was necessary to find a new way of taking it.
Del Toro, of course, knows that he is not the first to measure himself at Frankensteinhe is probably one of the biggest fans in the world of Mary Shelley and the Matriciel film by James Whale, and the solution he found to give a feeling of novelty is simply to start from scratch, to go back to the sources of the book.
His film therefore begins in the same place as the novel: in the Blizzard of the North Pole, on the borders of the Earth, where sailors whose ship is stuck in ice will be the witnesses of the mythological fight that Doctor Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and a creature of supernatural power (Jacob Elordi) Del Toro immediately gives his film the breath of an epic, a huge adventure film.
It is generous, welcoming, a bit grandiloquent, and the whole film will be like this: an immense machinery, often stunning, one of the most accomplished aesthetically films and the most maniably designed by its author, bathed, passed his polar intro, in a universe of Gothic melodrama, where the slightest touch of color in the background is there to tell themes and underline the themes in a pictorial way. A kind of Crimson Peak “Blockbusted”.
Del Toro portrays Victor Frankenstein as a injured child, who once become great and having in turn given life, will reproduce the ill -treatment on his creature in his youth. In which character does the filmmaker project? Both, of course, both in this freak abandoned by his “father”, and in this demiurge totally possessed by his Promethean project – the antire of the mad scientist is also like a make -up artist or visual artist Working on a fantastic film, with these dismembered bodies piled up on each other, mountain of human flesh in Charpie that Frankenstein went to seek on the battlefields where soldiers who will serve as guinea pigs.
The heart of the story will be played in the dialectic between the two characters, and, precisely, about heart, we would have liked that that of the film beats a little stronger. Jacob Elordi composes an astonishing, often touching creature (the long segment devoted to his learning, his life as a fugitive and his meeting with the old blind, is among the most successful things in the film), but certain portraits of secondary characters are a little shipped (especially that of Mia Goth, who plays the fiancée of Victor’s brother), while Oscar Isaac seriously weighs the whole with his interpretation of his interpretation Scientist in rock-star mode the fingers in the socket, all in rebellious wicks and unclogged shirt to the navel. Frankenstein Finally looks at itself as a succession of paintings, or chapters, more or less successful, more or less sumptuous. Rather than comparing them wisely to each other, we would have liked to get out of the room, shouting: “It’s alive !!!”. Satanted films dreams.
FrankensteinDe Guillermo del Toro, Avec Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, my Goth … Sur Netflix on 7 November.
