I had a vision, an idea took shape in my mind: inevitable, unavoidable, until it became truth.
Sarah Barrett: Columnist (UK)
Make no mistake, Guillermo del Toro is the king of the monsters. After his Oscar-winning hit The Shape of Water, about a downtrodden woman who falls in love with a captive fish-man, del Toro turned his attention to perhaps the most famous monster story of all time: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The movie is a critical triumph, with 86% on RottenTomatoes and quite a bit of Oscar buzz. It’s also encouraged a lot of people – myself included – to pick up the book. The book and the movie are very different beasts, but they have the same question at their core: What makes us human?
The tale of a scientist who attempts to artificially create a human being and is horrified by the result is one of those rare stories that evolved into outright myth over the years. And the grip it has on pop culture is impossible to overstate. The 1930s Universal movies with Boris Karloff playing Frankenstein’s Monster gave us many of the visual concepts we associate with the Monster today, such as the bolts in the neck, and that depiction of the Monster can be spotted in many a gift shop when Halloween rolls round.
It’s not quite accurate to Shelley’s vision, however. In the book, the Monster – or should he be called by the more neutral name given to him, the Creature? –
His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
“Purity” is the key word when it comes to describing del Toro’s Creature.
Del Toro and his team of accomplished designers clearly used this as their blueprint. Their Creature, as played by The Kissing Booth teen heartthrob Jacob Elordi in a performance that has awed many people, has the lustrous dark hair that’s been missing in previous adaptions.
And yet – herein lies one of the movie’s few flaws – this alleged monster isn’t quite monstrous enough for us to feel the full weight of his isolation, the isolation which drives him to murder in the book.
He looks unusual, true, but not enough to make people faint at the sight of him and call him a demon. (For my money, one of the best and scariest versions of the Creature is the statue that stands at the Plaine de Plainpalais in Geneva, the spot where he killed an innocent child.)
In fact, everything about del Toro’s version of the Creature is much more human than Shelley’s version or indeed most other adaptions…
But of course, having seen del Toro’s body of work, who could have expected anything less? He declared at the Golden Globes in 2018, “Since childhood, I’ve been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them, because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing.”
But there was one monster above all that stood out to him; the Karloff take on Frankenstein’s Monster. He saw the movie as a youngster and was awestruck – but also overcome with melancholy. “[The monster] is not going to last,” he remembered to the Hollywood Reporter. “‘Such purity cannot last in the world of men.’”
“Purity” is the key word when it comes to describing del Toro’s Creature. After being built from the corpses of dead soldiers and hanged criminals, he comes alive to meet his creator, Victor (Oscar Isaac), but does not find a parent in him. After all, Victor has no role model, as his own father was abusive. Victor chains the Creature up, berates him when he doesn’t learn speech fast enough, and generally treats him in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of a father abusing an autistic teen. Yet while Mary Shelley’s Creature turned to brutal revenge after being abused, del Toro’s Creature remains largely innocent, only killing in self-defense.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein serves almost as a “what if?” alternate universe to the original book – what if a few people actually did accept the Creature as human? In the movie Elizabeth (Mia Goth) instantly befriends the Creature when she finds him chained in Victor’s dungeon, and a sort of doomed, unconsummated romance plays out between them. The Creature also finds a foster father briefly in the character of the Blind Man (David Bradley) who is unaware of what the Creature looks like but treats him with the kindness Victor did not give.
These are the characters the audience are meant to root for, because one of the morals of the movie is that unquestioning fear of “the other” is wrong. Here, del Toro’s identity as a Mexican film director comes into play. It’s surely not a coincidence that the movie should denounce the concepts of prejudice and bigotry during an era in American history where Mexicans are being “othered” and deported. The Creature is a stand-in for the groups today who are treated poorly for just existing. One line of dialogue from the Creature to Victor has been oft-quoted in social media posts about the movie: “To you I am obscene, but to myself I simply am.” This is a reminder to people to constantly reevaluate what they find monstrous – what they find “other”. They may have hidden prejudices, as do we all.
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With that kind of baggage, perhaps it’s surprising that del Toro chose to end the movie with his Creature forgiving Victor. Victor apologizes to the Creature for the terrible things he put him through, and the Creature not only forgives him, but also comforts him as he dies. “Perhaps now, we can both be human,” he says. After that, he walks away into the sun with a burden lifted off him.
Viewers might question if Victor should have ever been forgiven after he chained and abused what was functionally his own child, but in the end, the Creature is the one that benefits most from that act of forgiveness, not Victor. Del Toro’s movie is in many ways a culmination of over a century’s worth of people reading Mary Shelley’s book and feeling sympathy for the Creature and hatred for Victor as he plays the role of neglectful god.
After all, when the Creature rages and murders he’s only doing what monsters are supposed to do, but Victor very much wasn’t doing what humans are supposed to do when he made a living being out of corpses. The final scene of the movie speaks to our humanity by saying we can be forgiven for our mistakes if we’re truly sorry, and that we can break cycles of abuse. Just as monsters embody the possibility of failing, they also embody the possibility of picking ourselves back up again and defiantly living our lives in a world that may not have been built for us.
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