“Frankenstein” by Guillermo del Toro… when a dream turns into a beautiful nightmare | art

Many filmmakers carry in their hearts a film that resembles a dream, a project that haunts them, and whenever they get close to it, it dissipates like a mirage. “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “Silence” by Martin Scorsese, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” by Terry Gilliam, and other directors who lived the same experience, and most recently “Frankenstein” by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro.

For Guillermo del Toro, “Frankenstein” was a long-awaited personal passion project, as he spent years anticipating the moment when the elements of success would come together: sufficient financing, a mature directorial vision, and appropriate techniques. The delays that accompanied the project were not just ordinary production obstacles, but rather the result of a complex production model that combines a huge cinematic ambition on the one hand, and an unusual artistic vision on the other hand.

This was finally achieved thanks to the production of the Netflix platform, so the film was released in its first cinematic showing in the official competition of the Venice Film Festival, followed by one special screening at the El Gouna Film Festival, before it was released in a limited showing in some cinema halls in preparation for its participation in the awards season race, leading to its global showing on the Netflix platform on the seventh of this November.

“Frankenstein” from nightmare to eternal legend

“Frankenstein” is based on the novel of the same name published by Mary Shelley in 1818 when she was 20 years old. The novel represents a legacy of science fiction literature presented in a Gothic world, and Gothic in art is a visual and narrative style that combines mystery, horror, and dark romance.

Although the first version of the novel was published without the name of the writer, through a simple publishing house and on the cheapest type of paper available, it was able to invade the literary community and gather readers around it, so other editions were issued on which the name of the young novelist appeared, and she explained in the introduction to her third edition the sources from which her novel was inspired, which was different from everything written before it.

In her teenage years, the British Mary Shelley lived for a period in Scotland, where she became close to the worlds of modern electrical discoveries. At the same time, she read the French translation of the German collection of stories, “Fantasmagoriana,” which mixed horror and nightmares.

Mary Shelley recalled a terrifying nightmare in which she saw a student shocked by his horror after reviving a body composed of human parts, along with a previous dream in which she tried to bring her deceased daughter Clara back to life – immediately after her birth – and began formulating her story about a scientist named Victor Frankenstein, who creates a human being, but his innovation turns into a tragedy that destroys his life.

The novel was presented on the big screen twice before, the first in 1931 as one of the established classics in horror cinema, in a film that took its terrifying side from the novel and left philosophy behind. As for the second version, the 1994 production by director Kenneth Branagh, in which he sought to be more faithful to the novel than the 1931 version, but the film received criticism for being visually distinctive and weak in substance.

In his own version, Guillermo del Toro tries to strike a balance between presenting the philosophy of the novel on the one hand, and visual dazzle on the other hand, while maintaining as many details of the original novel as possible.

The monster who wanted to be human

The film begins by presenting Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac, as a child raised by a caring mother and a strict, cruel father. He soon loses his mother while giving birth to his younger brother, despite his father’s rare medical prowess in that era. From that tragic moment, Victor decides to devote his life to finding a solution to the mystery of death and life.

As most viewers know – even those who have not read the novel or seen its previous adaptations that have cemented it in the collective memory – his unbridled genius leads him to invent a new being (portrayed by Jacob Elordi) made of human parts collected from different corpses, hoping to extract from each body the best in it to create a higher human being. However, the experience turns against him, as he is shocked by the creature’s weakness in understanding and learning, and in the end he decides to abort the project and get rid of the creature he created.

The film divides the narration of its events, according to the original novel, into two main parts: the first from Victor’s point of view, and the second from the point of view of the creature itself. The work maintains a classic style of linear narration from the past to the present, but the first part is distinguished by a stunning visual dazzle that reflects the stage of the first experiment in creating the creature and the elaborate bloody horror scenes that included it. In the second half, although the horror elements gradually fade, the psychological and dramatic suspense increases with the creature’s journey in search of itself.

The film skillfully displays the profound contradiction between the scientist and his creature; While Victor seeks to challenge death and overcome human weakness, the being in turn searches for the essence of humanity, and for the meaning of weakness itself, until death becomes for him an inevitable goal and aspiration.

Guillermo del Toro treats the story of “Frankenstein” not as a tale about an imaginary monster and evil, but rather as a mirror that reflects the essence of man himself. He presents the act of creation not only as a scientific achievement, but as an act that carries within it the sin of ambition and rebellion against nature. Victor Frankenstein does not create a monster as much as he creates a reflection of his human arrogance and madness, while the so-called monster turns into the most conscious, humane and suffering character in the film.

The woman absent in the novel…present in the film

Guillermo del Toro made several changes in the novel, most notably increasing the space for the character of Elizabeth (Mia Goth), Victor’s brother’s fiancée, who can communicate closely with the creature and despises Victor for his treatment of the latter, while in the novel this character and the rest of the female characters suffered from severe marginalization.

This is a deliberate marginalization of the writer who inherited her feminist vision from her mother, the writer and thinker Mary Wollstonecraft. In her novel, she implicitly presents an idea that embodies the model of ambitious male science, which “creates” life without involving women or nature in traditional ways, which places it in a position of clinging to power and control.

The absence of an active woman in the novel calls for highlighting how she was marginalized in patriarchal society, while her appearance in the film highlights the changes that have occurred in the position of women in society, at least from the director’s point of view.

Guillermo del Toro proves in “Frankenstein” that he does not make horror films as much as he creates human myths wrapped in darkness and beauty. He confronts the classic tale in the spirit of a poet rather than an effect maker, and brings to mind the idea that the true monster is not the one who was born deformed, but rather the one who lost his mercy in the name of science and ambition.