1332 Frankenstein

[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.

[Finch]

Guillermo del Toro’s spellbinding take on one of the most enduring of all modern myths, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, imbues the classic tale with new depths of humanity while pushing it toward dazzling heights of gothic grandeur. Shifting between the perspectives of the brilliant but callous Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and the creature (Jacob Elordi) he fashions from flesh and then cruelly mistreats, del Toro movingly reframes the legend as a story of fathers and sons struggling to break free from cycles of trauma. A decades-in-the-making triumph of darkly ravishing visual invention and operatic storytelling, Frankenstein is a deeply personal statement from a director who has long been drawn to the realm where men and monsters merge.

4K digital master of the theatrical version of the film, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
4K digital master of Frankenstein: The Reborn Cut, a new 158-minute extended director’s cut of the film, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
Two 4K UHD discs of the films presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the films and special features
New audio commentary on The Reborn Cut, featuring director Guillermo del Toro
The Anatomy Lesson: Director’s Cut, a new documentary on the making of the film
The Parlour, a collection of conversations on craft featuring del Toro; actors Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Oscar Isaac; cinematographer Dan Laustsen; production designer Tamara Deverell; costume designer Kate Hawley; and creature designer Mike Hill
Q&As moderated by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and musician Patti Smith
Interview with composer Alexandre Desplat conducted by film-music scholar Jon Burlingame
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and English descriptive audio
PLUS: An essay by scholar and author Christopher Frayling

New cover by Denver Balbaboco

[tenia]

Even the making of is getting a "director's cut" ?

[wattsup32]

Mr. Sausage, thanks for all of these comments. Like you, Del Toro doesn't do it for me, either. The closest I've come to liking one of his films is Pan's Labyrinth, and I didn't come particularly close there. It is a shame that I haven't found a way to appreciate his art because I love listening to him talk about cinema. It is inspiring and almost no one is a better champion of the medium.

So, your comments are giving me a reason to give this a chance after I avoided seeing it in the theater.

[mfunk9786]

This film seems to attract a lot of ire online. (Source: the reaction to this announcement) What’s so off-putting about it? I loved it, but also usually can understand why something’s a lightning rod. This never once struck me as one of those.

[therewillbeblus]

All the sentimentality with Elordi's Creature soiled the stronger first section for me, which I expressed more thoroughly on the previous page

[mfunk9786]

All the sentimentality with Elordi's Creature soiled the stronger first section for me, which I expressed more thoroughly on the previous page

Wouldn't group you in with the sort I'm talking about. People are acting like they just announced Madame Web, though. Maybe this is just what happens when a director falls out of fashion.

[Never Cursed]

This film seems to attract a lot of ire online. (Source: the reaction to this announcement) What’s so off-putting about it? I loved it, but also usually can understand why something’s a lightning rod. This never once struck me as one of those.

Is it anything more than the combination of overexposure (because of the Oscars etc) and people disliking it/finding it kind of White Elephant-ish (it’s a prestige literary adaptation that makes a lot of expensive stylistic choices etc.)? I don’t like it either, but it isn’t awful and I don’t think the hostility against it would be so sustained if it hadn’t been a big awards player

[Mr.DarjeelingLimited]

I really loved this film, don’t understand the hate.