Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix adaptation debuts in Venice

A few years ago, Netflix boss Ted Sarandos was meeting with Guillermo del Toro when he asked the celebrated director which films were on his bucket list.

Del Toro answered with two names: “Pinocchio and Frankenstein.”

“Do it,” Sarandos replied, effectively agreeing to fund both projects for the streaming giant. The first film, Del Toro’s acclaimed dark-fantasy version of Pinocchio, arrived in 2022.

But when it came to starting work on Frankenstein, del Toro had one warning: “It’s big.”

He wasn’t joking. The Mexican filmmaker’s ambitious take on the famous mad scientist and his monstrous creation is one of the centrepieces of this year’s Venice Film Festival. It’s a project he has been working towards for decades.

“It’s sort of a dream, or more than that, a religion for me since I was a kid,” del Toro tells journalists at the festival.

He highlights Boris Karloff’s performance in the 1931 adaptation as particularly influential, but it’s taken a long time for del Toro’s own version to reach the screen.

“I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, creatively, in terms of achieving the scope that it needed, to make it different, to make it on a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world,” he explains.

Now that the process has come to an end and the movie is about to be released, the director jokes he’s “now in postpartum depression”.

Since the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, there have been hundreds of films, TV series and comic books featuring some iteration of the famous character.

The latest adaptation sees Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac take on the role of Victor Frankenstein, with Saltburn and Euphoria actor Jacob Elordi unrecognisable as the monster-like creature he gives life to.

Isaac recalls: “Guillermo said, ‘I’m creating this banquet for you, you just have to show up and eat’. And that was the truth, there was a fusion, I just hooked myself into Guillermo, and we flung ourselves down the well.

“I can’t believe I’m here right now,” he adds, “that we got to this place from two years ago. It just seemed like such a pinnacle.”

Andrew Garfield had originally been cast as the titular creature, but had to leave the project due to scheduling conflicts which arose from the Hollywood actors’ strike.

Elordi stepped in at short notice. “Guillermo came to me quite late in the process,” the actor recalls, “so I had about three weeks before I got to filming.

“It presented itself as a pretty monumental task, but like Oscar said, the banquet was there, and everybody was already eating by the time I got there, so just had to pull up a seat. It was a dream come true.”

The film also stars Cristoph Waltz and Mia Goth as Elizabeth, who marries Frankenstein but grows distant from him as she offers more kindness to to the creature than he does.

The film is split into three parts – a prelude, followed by two versions of events told from the points of view of both Frankenstein and his creation.

It shows Frankenstein’s childhood and the factors that drove him to start work on the project in the first place. But it also encourages audiences to see things from the creature’s point of view – shining a light on how badly treated he was by his creator.

At 149 minutes, there is room for the characters and their back stories to be fleshed out. In early reviews of the film, most critics agreed it just about earns its run time.

“It perhaps might have been shortened, but del Toro’s sandbox is so irresistible, the return to big Hollywood moviemaking so pronounced, it must be hard to stop,” said Deadline’s Pete Hammond.

“Once a filmmaker on the scale of del Toro gets unleashed in the lab, why cut it short?”

But other reviews suggested it was far from del Toro’s best. The Independent’s Geoffrey McNab said it was “all show and little substance”, adding: “For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.”

There was much more enthusiasm from the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, who wrote: “One of del Toro’s finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry.”

And in a four-star review, Total Film’s Jane Crowther said: “Masterfully concocted and pertinent in theme, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a classy, if somewhat safe, adaptation with awards legs.”

Del Toro is one of his generation’s most beloved directors, treasured in the industry for his own love of cinema and his ambition for what it can do.

The 60-year-old is also Hollywood’s go-to filmmaker for stories involving monsters or other fantastical creatures. His credits include Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim and The Shape of Water. The latter won him the Oscar for best picture and best director in 2018.

He has great affection for monsters and is known for humanising them in his films, evoking sympathy from the audience for characters previously seen as villains.

In Frankenstein’s case, he says: “I wanted the creature to be newborn. A lot of the interpretations are like accident victims, and I wanted beauty.”

His vision and attention to detail with Frankenstein extended to every aspect of the production, ensuring great care went into costumes and sets – which are overwhelmingly real, physical settings rather than computer-generated landscapes.

“CGI is for losers,” comments Waltz, to much laughter. Del Toro adds that filming with real-life backdrops ultimately draws out a better performance from the actors than using green screens.

He likens the distinction between CGI and physical craftsmanship to the difference between “eye candy and eye protein”, but adds he does use digital effects when absolutely necessary.

The idea of creating a sapient being which ends up operating on its own terms might sound familiar today, but del Toro says the movie is “not intended as a metaphor” for artificial intelligence, as some critics have suggested.

Instead, he reflects: “We live in a time of terror and intimidation, and the answer, which art is part of, is love. And the central question in the novel from the beginning is, what is it to be human?

“And there’s no more urgent task than to remain human in a time when everything is pushing towards a bipolar understanding of our humanity. And it’s not true, it’s entirely artificial.”

He continues: “The multi-chromatic characteristic of a human being is to be able to be black, white, grey, and all the shades in between. The movie tries to show imperfect characters, and the right we have to remain imperfect.”