Del Toro delivers his monster, ‘Frankenstein’ at Venice

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro gave birth to another monster on Saturday, his big-budget “Frankenstein” movie, joking that the effort had left him worn out as his creation got its world premiere in Venice. The last creature he delivered here, the aquatic being in “The Shape of Water”, swam off with the festival’s top prize in 2017 before going on to triumph at the Oscars. This latest version of the Mary Shelley masterpiece is also among the 21 films in competition for the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion.

Del Toro’s film is an elaborate, evocative production the director said he had been dreaming about making since he was a child. In one early rave review, the Hollywood Reporter said the film “transcends horror in an emotionally charged take on Mary Shelley”. “I’ve been following the creature since I was a kid,” the director told journalists at the Venice Film Festival ahead of the premiere.

“I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively and in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world,” Del Toro said. “And now I’m in post-partum depression.” It was surely no accident that the film got its premiere on what is know as Frankenstein Day — the August 30 birthday of the novel’s author, Mary Shelley.

Starring Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creation, the film is a no-holds-barred Gothic spectacle. Following the scientist obsessed with inventing his own living creature, it explores themes of humanity, vengeance, unbridled will and the aftermath of that all-consuming hubris. The film’s rich visuals include the imposing tower where Frankenstein performs his experiments and the gruesome anatomical parts from which his creature is stitched together. Not everyone was convinced however. “Variety” said the film “cost more than ‘Titanic’ and still looks like it was made for TV”.

Since James Whale’s seminal 1931 “Frankenstein” starring Boris Karloff, there have been a string of adaptations, testimony to the appeal of the story. They range from serious takes such as “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” of 1994 from Kenneth Branagh, to Mel Brooks’s 1974 spoof “Young Frankenstein”.

For Del Toro, Mary Shelley’s novel tries to answer the question “What is it to be human?”, he told journalists.

“I think that the movie tries to show imperfect characters and the right we have to remain imperfect. And the right we have to understand each other under the most oppressive of circumstances,” he said. “And there’s no more urgent task than to remain human in a time where everything is pushing towards a bipolar understanding of our humanity,” he said, referring to the modern world. The Netflix-produced film will have a limited theatrical release in October before streaming in November.

While “Frankenstein” is the biggest production launching on Saturday, “The Last Viking” by Danish director and writer Anders Thomas Jensen and “Below the Clouds” by Italian documentary maker Gianfranco Rosi drew enthusiastic applause at their press screenings. “The Last Viking” is a darkly comic, sometimes disturbing drama about mental health and identity politics, featuring Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen as a suicidal man with a personality disorder.

“Below the Clouds” is a sumptuous black-and-white rendering of the gritty and historic Italian port of Naples by Rosi, one of Europe’s most acclaimed documentary makers who won the main prize in Venice in 2013 with “Sacro GRA”. On the sidelines of the festival on the Lido on Saturday, several thousand protesters marched against Israel’s siege of Gaza, a demonstration called by left-wing political groups in northeast Italy.

The Gaza war was one of the main talking points in the lead up to the festival due to an open letter denouncing the Israeli government and calling on the festival to speak out. The letter, drafted by a group of independent directors called Venice4Palestine, has garnered more than 2,000 signatures from film professionals, organisers said.

Agence France-Presse