However, when we first encounter the Creature, we see almost nothing of it: it is a faceless ghost in a dark cloak and a vengeful mood, coldly pursuing its creator, Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). It's 1857, and we're somewhere in the Arctic. A ship heading to the North Pole is stuck in the ice, and its stranded sailors, led by Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen), shelter the seriously wounded Victor. Much of this comes from the novel, although Shelley must have missed the part where the Creature kills several sailors with his bare hands and is taken by a blunderbuss from the side of the ship, apparently to his death. But then, in exquisite del Toro style, the Thing's skeletal fingers web-tap dance on the snow, a sign that he's about to spring into action again. In a nice nod to Keith, someone shouts, “This is still alive!”
Thanks to ingenuity, the Creature is temporarily restrained, giving the fragile Victor just enough time to regal the kind Captain with his life story. In a long flashback, we meet young Victor (Christian Convery), a sensitive, dark-haired child born into great privilege but also abused by his father. His father, Baron Leopold Frankenstein (Charles Dance, eerily reptilian as always), is a surgeon; he puts his medical expertise into his son and delivers a good hit when drilling isn't enough. Victor is much closer to his mother, Claire (Mia Goth), a shy and caring soul, although not for long. She dies giving birth to her second son, William, and for Victor, tragedy becomes destiny: he decides to conquer death and eclipse his father's legacy by learning to create a new life. The gentle Convery suddenly transforms into Isaac, who steps into the role with the wide eyes and fervor of a man possessed.
One of the bitterest ironies of this story is that Victor will become a more demanding, more neglectful, and far more destructive father than Leopold ever was. Del Toro, always attentive to the minutiae of the process, turns the convoluted logistics of resuscitation into a series of referendums on Victor's humanity. As he calmly makes his way through the freshly fallen corpses on the battlefield, Victor demonstrates more than just scientific detachment; later, you half expect him to whistle as he works to saw through a corpse's limb. God is in the details, and del Toro takes great pleasure in them; no less than Victor, he is a connoisseur of bloody carnage. Much scientific attention is also given to the science of storing electricity, allowing the body to function as a constantly recharging battery, as well as the use of a huge lightning rod mechanism that will harness lightning from the top of the isolated tower where Victor conducts his experiments. (Tamara Deverell's gorgeously spiky design has a distinctly turret syndrome.) When the Thing surprisingly comes to life, although not quite as planned, Victor is in a trance for about five minutes before seeming to lose interest. He sees only the flaws—not the strange, unforeseen miracles—in his plan.
If you miss the feeling of family history being brutally repeated, here's Mia Goth again, this time playing Elizabeth, the fiancée of Victor's younger brother, William (Felix Kammerer). When Victor falls in love with her, it's the film's sly way of emphasizing his mama-boy complex – an Oedipal touch confirmed by Kate Hawley's exquisite costumes, who dresses Claire and Elizabeth in dresses of striking color and plumage. After Victor imprisons the Creature under the stairs, it is Elizabeth who discovers him and befriends him, even though she is proportionately more disgusted by Victor. Few directors who saw Goth leering at carnage in The Pearl (2022) and Infinity Pool (2023) would consider casting her as a decent woman. But del Toro plays a complex, genre-blurring game; he uses the visual language of horror—a form symbolized by the Gothic—to challenge us to exceed our expectations of horror.
Throughout the film, del Toro flits and oscillates between conflicting ideas, with the restlessness of the beautiful butterflies that Elizabeth, an amateur entomologist, loves to study. Hoping to liberate the Frankenstein myth from the deadening confines of parody and pastiche, del Toro returns to Shelley's novel with renewed reverence, though few would mistake him for a literary purist. His inventions come from within the material, but also from within himself; he seems to be so closely fused with the text that the deeper he dives into it, the more personal his deviations and embellishments become. There is a recurring image of an angel, glittering in red, who haunts Victor's childhood dreams. A Catholic picture brought to fiery life, it's a classic del Toro look reminiscent of the winged seraphs in Chronos (1992) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008).
