Guillermo del Toro has made several monster movies of a particular bent — soulful, swoony, feverish films about grotesque-looking creatures who prove themselves more deeply human than the humans who reject them. Hellboy (2004) was a half-demon with a full heart. The Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water (2017) was an emo f-boy with gill slits. Even the titular marionette in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) was such a mensch that he earned the right to trade in his knotty pine physiognomy for a flesh bag.

Soulful, swoony, feverish, with a narrative that stacks the emotional deck in favor of the hideous outcast — I mean, that’s pretty much the jacket copy you’d find on any volume of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, right?

Which is why this seems like the perfect match between story and muse; certainly del Toro’s been talking about making his own version of the tale for decades, calling it his “lifelong dream.”

That dream is now realized, and while the resulting film captures the tone and spirit of the original novel in all its breathless zeal and hie-me-to-yon-fainting-couch deliriousness, the many narrative tweaks del Toro has made — some of which work, some of which don’t — ensure that you’d never mistake his Frankenstein for anyone else’s.

A monster matriculates

Boris Karloff in his role as the monster of Frankenstein.

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It’s light-years away, for example, from James Whale’s iconic 1931 version, which surgically implanted Boris Karloff’s lumbering, flat-topped, bolt-necked monster into the culture. Because while Whale was faithful to the bones (heh) of the novel, Karloff’s Creature never grew, intellectually or aesthetically. Maybe Whale was worried doing so would rob the monster of its primal power to clomp its way into his audience’s nightmares.

The book’s Creature, on the other hand, puts itself through a kind of hilarious autodidactical speed run, devouring Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Young Werther and, famously, Paradise Lost. Which is why you get the following disconnect:

Book Creature: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”

Karloff’s Creature: “FIRE BAD.”

There’s a lot more of book Creature in del Toro’s Frankenstein, which is good, because his monster inhabits the (literally, in this case) sculpted frame and brooding gaze of Jacob Elordi. For roughly half of his time onscreen, Elordi’s more or less in “FIRE BAD” mode, stumbling around in yellowish strips of cloth that, intentionally or not (but let’s face it, probably intentionally) evoke the gold lamé speedo sported by his Rocky Horror Picture Show analog.

Jacob Elordi as The Creature in Frankenstein.

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But before long the Creature installs that all-important upgrade: He secretly observes the daily life of a loving family, befriends their kindly blind patriarch (David Bradley) and avails himself of their reading matter. Elordi makes his Creature 2.0 just as compelling as the launch version; now outfitted with the full complement of human-emotion DLC (rage, yes — but also gratitude, empathy, sorrow and regret), he sets out to confront Victor (Oscar Isaac), his preening, arrogant brat of a creator.

This is all straight from Shelley’s novel, of course — it’s just inflected by del Toro’s maximalist, heart-affixed-firmly-to-the-sleeve sensibility, which extends to absolutely everything onscreen. The production design goes gratifyingly hard, featuring drawing rooms so huge their walls vanish into shadow, landscapes so vast they swallow the characters — and the buildings they occupy.

Victor’s lonely tower — the site of the Creature’s birth — is a gargoyle-festooned ruin atop a cliff so open to the elements that its rooms and staircases are piled with leaves and other bits of decaying organic matter. Its tiled floors feature yawning pits like frozen whirlpools, foreboding but strangely beautiful.

Spare parts

But del Toro’s spin on the material goes beyond its look and feel – he’s made several changes to the story that leave you wondering what narrative work they are actually doing, besides adding needless complications to justify the film’s two-and-half-hour running time.

He devotes a lot of attention — far more than the book does — to the life of young Frankenstein (heh), played by Christian Convery. Charles Dance adds yet another “stern father” performance to an IMDB page teeming with them, as Victor’s demanding dad, and their frosty, lightly sadistic relationship is clearly meant to foreshadow the one Victor will have with his Creature. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and its mystifying determination to explain to us that Wonka only became the candymaker he did because his father was … a dentist.

The film also introduces Christoph Waltz as Harlander, a mysterious figure who acts as Victor’s financial patron. The character ostensibly exists to contrast Victor’s scientific zeal to the greedy drive of capitalism, but I can’t shake the conviction that he could easily lift out of the film without leaving a hole.

A subplot involving Mia Goth’s Elizabeth represents another significant alteration that’s puzzling at first — why make Elizabeth the fiancée of Victor’s brother William (Felix Kammerer) instead of just making her Victor’s fiancée, as she is in the book?

The answer lies in the largest and most essential change that del Toro is making to the story here, which is to turn Victor into even more of a jerk — and, by extension, to cast the Creature as even more sympathetic.

It’s there in Isaac’s bluff, snotty, snooty take on Victor, who’s forever declaring his genius to anyone in earshot. It’s there in his snarling disgust at Elordi’s poor, chained up Creature. And it’s there in Victor’s not-remotely-sly attempts to seduce his own brother’s fiancée.

Elizabeth, for her part, is totally on board with del Toro’s efforts to get us on the Creature’s side; Goth shows us a young woman smart and self-possessed enough to recognize that underneath all the sutures and skin grafts, it’s still Jacob Freaking Elordi we’re talking about, here, people.

Del Toro doesn’t stop there — he also elides book-Creature’s most unsavory aspects and actions to highlight his version’s wet-eyed soulfulness and further cement its status as a blameless thing grievously wronged by the world in general, and by Victor in particular. It’s a marked adjustment from the novel, yes — but one that seems inevitable, given del Toro’s body of work, and his resolute need to portray the outsider as hero.

He’s never been subtle about this, and he’s not here either: At one point a character regards Victor. “You are the monster,” they tell him.

I cannot hope to convey, reader, just how wildly unnecessary that line is, given literally everything about the film we’ve been watching up to that point. It’s del Toro gilding a lily that he’s already spent more than two hours painstakingly crafting out of pure, 24-carat gold.

And yet it works, for him, and for his movie. Del Toro couldn’t possibly do anything less, and, given how perfectly suited he is to tell this story in this particular way, you wouldn’t want him to.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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