Frankenstein 2025 is... wow... just wow!
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
Let's get this out of the way: Guillermo del Toro knows how to make a movie. The man is a fucking genius. And yet it seems apart from just being technically proficient, he is also a master of making corruption of the audience emotionally satisfying. Let me explain. ↩ Reply
Quentin Tarantino ( who I presume is the inspiration for the film's production company's name. Frankenstein was Distributed by Netflix, but co-produced by Demilo Films, Bluegrass 7 and Double Dare You, which I suspect is a reference to the iconic scene from Pulp Fiction ) ...so Tarantino outlines in his book Cinema Speculation that Corruption of Audience is the quality of the film. ↩ Reply
There are two types of this: ↩ Reply
The more traditional, Tarantinoesque type. Or when the movie is trying to justify something gruesome, like murder, by presenting it in a specific light, like revenge. A very good example of it is Kill Bill by Tarantino, where the story is about getting to kill a guy. Which is justified by this guy being a total ass and nearly killing our protagonist in the beginning of the story. ↩ Reply
Or the second type, that is perfectly encapsulated in the Telugu Language Indian film by S. S. Rajamouli from 2012 called Eega. The whole concept of the film was to take something gross, and try to make the audience fall in love with it. Rajamouli thought about what is gross. And he landed on a Fly. Flies are kind of gross. They like shit. They spread germs. And they are annoying as fuck. And so the film was a film-making challenge to make a fly likable. He went a little bit too far in a few instances. Like he made the fly not just merely likable, but a straight up action hero. I mean, it is an Indian film after all. So... But... ↩ Reply
If the first Tarantinoesque type of corruption, seduces the audience into experiencing the malice. Into wanting to do something bad, for a brief period of time. The Rajamouliesque corruption, makes an emotionally fulfilling case where the corruption is the message of goodness. Where it flips your perception of something bad, by just simply letting you understand it. It is a form of empathetic corruption. ↩ Reply
Guillermo del Toro with his 2025 film Frankenstein somehow managed to do both in the same time. ↩ Reply
It is not strange that del Toro gravitated toward something like this. In a way Frankenstein is one of the original horror stories. But to understand what del Toro did specifically in his version, and to understand the way he did the double-corruption of this work, we need to look at a counter-example, of the same story being told differently. Luckily Frankenstein is a kind of Dracula. You get a lot of films re-telling this story. ↩ Reply
We are not going to go over everything, because there are like 400+ movies that feature the story ( as of 2025 ). But the main version I want to compare this one to is the Kenneth Branagh version from 1994. ↩ Reply
The Kenneth Branagh version suffers from self-indulgence a little bit. Kenneth Branagh being Kenneth Branagh cast himself ( Kenneth Branagh ) as Victor Frankenstein. I mean he casts himself in main roles pretty much all the time. And most of the times it works well. His Hercule Poirot films, or his 4 hour long Hamlet movie are fucking amazing films. And frankly, in my opinion, his version of Frankenstein is rather amazing too. For example, him casting Robert De Niro as the creature is a fucking cool ass move. The only thing I see wrong with that film is that sort of self-indulgent narcissism of Branagh himself. The problem is not in the movie. It is in understanding that the director and the actor is the same guy. ↩ Reply
But anyway... the Branagh film is trying to be this epic horror film thingie. It came out right after Francis Ford Coppola made a huge hit with his Dracula movie from 1992. And Coppola ( who was the producer ) tried recreating the success of the Dracula movie with the 1994 Frankenstein. So it is trying to both be epic as fuck, and scary as fuck in the same time. For that the movie leads really deeply into The Monster being a Monster. Because you need the characters ( and by extension, the audience ) to be very afraid of him. And the whole message, so to speak, of the film, seems more to do with the fact that Victor's attempt to reanimate a human was wrong. And not with how people reacted to the Monster that came out of it. Even though the film tried giving empathy points to the monster, it ultimately used them to make him seem like this insane psychopath type character. Which makes the monster scarier. ↩ Reply
Guillermo del Toro's version is doing something completely different. It is kind of a horror film. I mean del Toro is not afraid to show you some gnarly stuff on the screen. He is kind of one of the most fucked up people today, when it comes to on-screen violence. But with del Toro films, even though the violence is fucked up, the emotionality of the rest of the film is so fucking good, that it doesn't really bother you much. He is not trying to do fucked up shit to fuck up the audience like Eli Roth or Lars Von Trier. He is doing it to enhance the story. To give the audience the thrill of witnessing everything as it should be. The sad stuff is sad, the funny stuff is funny and the gnarly stuff is gnarly. ↩ Reply
So when shit happens in this film, shit really happens. People don't just fly into a wall. They crunch up. They break limbs. They fall into a fire and then you see them trying to put themselves out, while the action continues to the next victim. Frankenstein is a body horror film, so the body horror stuff is well done. You see mutilation. You see blood. You see gnarly shit. But what you feel is not that at all... ↩ Reply
The film gives a substantial amount of screen-time developing an empathetic connection between the monster and the audience. There is like the whole chapter, specifically dedicated to understanding the monster. And that chapter takes half of the movie. But that is not the only time the movie gives to paint the monster as a sort of victim, of sorts. ↩ Reply
If anything, the film plays on the same emotional level as the Stephen Chbosky 2017 film Wonder starring Jacob Tremblay. Where the movie is about an ugly boy suffering from a rare facial deformity called mandibulofacial dysostosis. And about how other kids are making his life miserable, because of him being ugly. Jacob Elordi's character in 2025th Frankenstein is also an ugly dude that is hated for the sole reason of him being different. Yes, he is technically a zombie. And he is technically made out of parts from different dead people. But he is an alive, thinking, breathing, feeling person right now. Also, interesting casting decision... both are Jacobs. Hm... ↩ Reply
The double-corruption happens because the monster is both like the Fly in Eega and both has rage inside of himself that we totally understand. We almost want him to kill Victor Frankenstein ( Oscar Isaac ) as a sort of revenge for abuse. ↩ Reply
Now here is something interesting. In this movie, the creature and Victor come to a conclusion that the creature is Victor's son. Conceptually it sort of makes sense. But that makes the whole film contextually interesting. Even bordering on requiring a psycho-sexual analysis of del Toro. ↩ Reply
If Victor is the father of the creature, what does that show you? ↩ Reply
There is a substantial portion of the film, in the beginning, dedicated to Victor's childhood, where Victor is played by Christian Convery. That portion establishes a sort of troubling relationship between Victor and his father ( Charles Dance ) who claims that he demands perfection from his son, because he shares his name and therefor his reputation. That is an interesting thing. ↩ Reply
Now think about it. Victor grows up trying to prove himself more worthy than his father, by developing technology to reanimate dead people. And he succeeds in the creature. But the creature isn't perfect. His "son" or his "result" so to speak, is not the thing that he is proud of. And so he tries to abuse the creature into something more akin to what he wanted. It fails. So then he tries to kill him. This fails as well. He tries to distance himself from the failure, because it is his son. There is even a scene where the creature points at himself and calls himself "Victor", showing that at the very least in some metaphorical sense, the creature shares the name of Victor and therefor shares his reputation. ↩ Reply
Maybe the film argues that we, the human race, abuse our own kids, in order to conform them into what we want them to be. What society wants them to be. And that we should stop abusing them. We should stop hating those that are simply strange. We should respect our children whatever they are. The father of Victor would beat him with a stick ( a common practice at those times ) if Victor failed to learn something. This is a form of child-abuse. Victor put shackles on the creature and constantly abused him both verbally and physically because the creature failed to show signs of intelligence. He wasn't dumb. Just he didn't show the signs Victor wanted to see. Kids around the world are treated like the creature. Mothers arrested for seemingly absurd reasons: for letting their kids be independent. Why? Because people don't see the signs they want to see, that they think are the signs of intelligence. So we shackle our own kids. Break the whole world in pursuit of human-rights violating laws, to be able to shackle them easier. And believe anybody who think different as monsters that are justified to be murdered for just being different. ↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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c:0I find The Elephant Man by David Lynch a Rajamouliesque film. There is a deformed man we grow to love.
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