Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Let's keep catching up on 2025.
Frankenstein
I was interested, sometimes enthralled, if not entirely convinced, by Guillermo del Toro's 2023 remake of Nightmare Alley, for which the filmmaker lavished every bit of cinephile fetishism he could on each lushy-conceived shot. One expected no less from his Frankenstein project, which the director has talked about for years. Is it possible that del Toro spent too many years thinking about everything he wanted to pour into a Frankenstein movie? Because this one—as handsomely dressed as you would expect—is crammed with ideas, yet curiously lacking in there-ness.
Although full of movie-movie stylization, Nightmare Alley at least felt like it existed in some kind of world. Frankenstein is oddly weightless, even if it contains some marvelous images. For instance, early in his surgical education, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) gives a medical lecture involving a wild patched-up cadaver that jerks around with galvanic spasms; great fun to see, and yet that room has little physical presence, nothing like the lecture hall in James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, where a few anatomical charts and some brain-packed jars convey the wonderfully casual sense of macabre study. And del Toro's film feels compromised by its Marvelesque episodes of over-the-top violence, such as the opening mayhem with the creature (Jacob Elordi) tossing sailors in spine-cracking volleys against the beams of a icebound ship, or an episode with wolves running amok. The violence is of the digitally-manufactured cartoon variety, and has the feeling of something that del Toro thought necessary to punctuate the more thoughtful concerns of Mary Shelley's story.
The opening sequence also cuts against our natural tendency to sympathize with the creature. (What did those sailors do to deserve this, other than participating in some undoubtedly colonialist outreach?) I don't doubt that del Toro empathizes deeply with the creature, yet there are reliable parts of the Frankenstein story—the poignant aspect of the son's rejection by his creator, especially—that are strangely under-developed in this version. My favorite parts of the novel take place when the new man is out on his own, observing human beings and learning their languages and picking up culture. That section falls flat in this take. Of course, del Toro has his own ideas and emphases, and he's trundled down some quirky paths here; the character played by Christoph Waltz, for instance, and the sense of handed-down father/son agonies in the fraught relationship between Victor and his imperious parent (Charles Dance, looking as though he is already being kept alive by an experiment).
Having registered my disappointment, I acknowledge that there's a lot percolating in del Toro's ideas; surely there must be some juice in the fact that the same actress, Mia Goth, plays both Victor's mother and his eventual love interest. But I confess I can't seem to access them, because the surface is so slippery, and for me the movie remains a shiny object only spasmodically coming to life.
December 12, 2025
