Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025)

[knives]

Interesting. I love the sympathetic almost zen like nature of his Created Woman performance.

[Mr Sausage]

That’s a good one, too—outwardly sympathetic, yet disconnected from the people around him. He doesn’t do evil from malice or apathy, but obliviousness.

[FrauBlucher]

I saw this today. Didn’t love it. While I appreciate Del Toro’s prowess and talent for filmmaking. I’m always left cold by his narrative. With this one the ending was so disappointing. I felt like after all that, that’s the climax. Ugh. As Matt said about being exhausted from his maximalism and pictorialism, I’ll take that one step further by saying he sacrifices story to achieve all that visual grandioseness. I wanted to really like it as I’m a sucker for the Frankenstein horror story. Almost 100 years later I still appreciate the Whale and Karloff versions more.

One more thing to add. Only Del Toro can turn Frankenstein from a horror story to a fairy tale, as he tends to do with many of his films. It's not a criticism per se, for this one it just didn't work for me. I'd much rather have Eggers do this

[The Curious Sofa]

The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth are similar in terms of setting and themes, but they demonstrate Del Toro's transition from horror to fairy tales. I much prefer The Devil's Backbone, although Pan's Labyrinth is more widely acclaimed and won several awards, one reason being that it had a much more high profile release.

The initially sympathetic Jacinto in The Devil's Backbone, gradually becomes the film's villain. There are shades of grey here, and it breaks your heart when he betrays and kills the people who love him. In contrast, Vidal in Pan's Labyrinth is an irredeemable monster from the outset, it "others" its fascist villain by making him unrelatable, smoothing out moral complexities. The film leans far more heavily into the fairy-tale genre by reducing everything to a simple good versus evil conflict. And that's a problem I've had with Del Toro's movies ever since, including Frankenstein

[Mr Sausage]

Fairy tales aren't defined by simple binaries or morals, tho'. Some are downright inexplicable. Look at the Brothers Grimm or the 1001 Nights. I'm not the biggest fan of Pan's Labyrinth, but it's not so simplistic itself, given not only the fate of its protagonist, but how she, too, shows oddly selfish and privileged behaviour, like in the banquet scene with the hand-eye monster. Del Toro's thing is a fairy tale atmosphere, but he's really working with fables. In his fables, there are evil monsters, but it's the normies who're the monsters, and those usually labled monster are marginal figures of great beauty or interest. This goes all the way back to Cronos, where there's another evil normie, a big businessman who seeks monstrousness, but the movie's actual vampire is a sympathetic old man cared for by his granddaughter. Even in The Devil's Backbone you have the sympathetic ghosts and a young caretaker who, while initially sympathetic, is revealed to be evil and gets a moralistic comeuppance (ie. the orphanage is haunted by the spectres of wealth, power, and fascism, but not by its ghosts). This is why Mimic is a weak film: the normies are the heroes and the monsters are the monsters and everything is very simple. But usually Del Toro is opposed to conventional social order with its conventional morality and set of approved people. It's been that way from the start.

Tho', again, Victor in the movie is not a simple bad guy, which is why he gets no comeuppance in the end. He's sympathetic like Jacinto, a man deprived of love and tormented by an authority figure until it ruins him, turning him hard and selfish. Even Christoph Walz's normie asshole proves sympathetic to some degree. Del Toro gives us a lot more to sympathize with than Hammer did in The Curse of Frankenstein, where the Baron starts on a path of premeditated murder the moment it's useful.