The frozen mirror, review of Frankenstein

More than a good connoisseur of the Frankenstein novel, Del Toro has Shelley’s story engraved in his soul. The idea of ​​the monstrous, of the different, of the other, has accompanied him since his initiation. Chronos. In fact, eternity and heterodoxy are the columns on which a vocationally fantastic imaginary is based, intrinsically freaky and, at times, crossed by a lyricism that, when well put together, thrills with the vibrant magnetism of Chaplin and the sad estrangement of Browning.

It seems accepted and indisputable that the Dracula by Bram Stoker has more literary stature than the Frankenstein by Mary Schelley. If only because of the way in which both were conceived, just in a weekend in the case of Modern Prometheus, the question of the height of the text belongs to Dracula’s father. But if one dives into the symbolic depth and the ability to awaken commiseration and empathy, Frankenstein’s monster, that creature created by the man-god, victim of his incompetence, his ambition and his dreams, makes him endearing, close, flesh of our sins and son of our folly.

This is how Guillermo del Toro understands it, who has not hesitated to bring out all his artillery to reinvent a story that is substantial to him. More than a movie, Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro is presented as a tribute, like that bouquet of flowers that a lover places on the grave of the one he admires, whom he loved very much and has now lost. Del Toro said that when he read as a child, in a paperback edition of Bruguera, Shelley’s novel, when he embraced the final passage where the creator and his creature, a procreation without intercourse or divine intervention, settle accounts in the frozen tundra where the doctor dies and where his work is lost, he cried. From those tears emerges this torrent of high visual power and disappointing emotional paralysis. If you pay attention to what the images capture, the fascination hypnotizes. Everything drips with symbolism, everything means, everything combines ideas, images, memories… The aesthetic recreation of this Frankenstein, the power of its staging, is overwhelming. Del Toro, with the thirst of a feverish heterodox, breaks down and recreates, not only Shelley’s text in its different versions, but the films that were born from it. Armed by technology, the scientist’s laboratory has never looked so splendor. The imagination of the Mexican director appears overflowing. His Frankenstein has a DNA woven by Shelley’s words and Del Toro’s universe. His monster is not made of iron and fire like the one recreated by James Whale and given an emblematic appearance by Boris Karloff. His creature is made of blood and porcelain and its representation is reminiscent of the gallery of heroes of Del Toro’s universe. We perceive that in Jacob Elordi the aqueous creatures that populate the imagination of its director are projected, of Pan’s Labyrinth a The shape of water.

The feeling before this new Frankenstein, which will not be the definitive one, resembles a roller coaster, going from vertigo to disappointment, from shock to downtime, from rapture to disaffection. A good part of this lies in the fact that the director seems more concerned with highlighting the comments, the details of erudition and passion for Shelley’s prose, rather than delving into the emptiness that afflicts that mirror where creature and creator look at each other without seeing each other. The film recreates and rearranges, even being unfaithful to the original spirit of the story, this story told so many times. In her lies that concern, the daughter of romanticism, for eternity and life after the collapse of God. Irregular and inconstant, Frankenstein breathes thanks to that gesture of devotion with which Del Toro once again becomes disoriented, like Coppola and those who risk everything for the obsession of a shadow lost in their childhood.