Director Guillermo del Toro delivers his monster Frankenstein at Venice Film Festival
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Frankenstein director Guillermo del Toro (centre) at the Venice Film Festival with stars of the movie Oscar Isaac (left) and Jacob Elordi.
PHOTO: AFP
Follow topic:
- Guillermo del Toro premiered his "Frankenstein" at Venice, a lifelong dream project described as an emotionally charged take on Mary Shelley's novel.
- The film, starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, explores humanity through a Gothic spectacle, though reviews were mixed with some criticising its visuals.
- Other films premiered, including "The Last Viking" and "Below The Clouds", while the Gaza war was a key discussion point due to a protest letter.
AI generated
VENICE – Mexican writer-director Guillermo del Toro gave birth to another monster on Aug 30, 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 film-maker said he had been dreaming about making since he was a child.
In one early rave review, The Hollywood Reporter said Frankenstein “transcends horror in an emotionally charged take on Mary Shelley”.
“I’ve been following the creature since I was a kid,” he 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 known as Frankenstein Day – the Aug 30 birthday of the 1818 novel’s English author Mary Shelley.
Starring Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his titular 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 US$120 million (S$154 million) film “cost more than (1997 film) Titanic and still looks like it was made for TV”.
Since English director James Whale’s seminal 1931 film 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 1994’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from English film-maker Kenneth Branagh to American director Mel Brooks’ 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.
Guillermo del Toro (left) and Oscar Isaac on the set of Frankenstein.
PHOTO: NETFLIX
“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 North America in October before streaming on Nov 7. AFP
