Guillermo del Toro's very human monster movie earns its buzz

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“We can be monsters together.”

It’s a sweet, almost pleading line delivered by the creature — a combination of Jacob Elordi and hours of meticulously applied prosthetics — in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Monday night.

The words capture the filmmaker’s sympathies toward monsters as seen in such films as Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and, most recently, The Shape of Water. That one also bowed at the Venice and Toronto festivals in 2017, and while it didn’t win the People’s Choice here, it did provide TIFF audiences with the frisson of watching it in the Elgin Theatre, where a key scene was also shot.

Frankenstein is, appropriately, a lumbering, long-legged beast of a movie, clocking in at a solid two and a half hours. It opens with a prelude that finds the creature in pursuit of its creator, Victor Frankenstein, in a frozen wasteland described only as “Farthermost North, 1857.”

That’s where a group of Danish sailors, their ship trapped in pack ice, makes the mistake of fighting the misunderstood monster, who handily dispatches six of them before being tossed into the drink. From there we get two lengthy chapters, one describing Victor’s road to creation, the second the creature’s story, told in his own words.

Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein, an arrogant scientist with a God complex who finds a patron in a wealthy arms dealer (Christoph Waltz) who also happens to be the uncle of Elizabeth (Mia Goth), engaged to Victor’s brother (Felix Kammerer).

Victor has been dabbling in the reanimation of dead matter, but with Waltz’s enthusiasm and ready cash — enough to buy a solid silver lightning rod and batteries big enough to power a TV remote the size of a church organ — he can take his experiments to the next level.

A gruesome montage that combines elements of open-heart surgery and IKEA bookshelf construction gives birth to the creature, but Victor is impatient with its lack of communication skills — think Groot — and quickly becomes abusive. We’re led to believe his own father’s treatment of him may be the root cause, an unnecessary psychological wrinkle in an already overstuffed production.

The creature responds more positively to Elizabeth, which only further enrages Victor, leading to a schism between the creator and his creation. “It doesn’t know any better,” Victor says of his decision to put the monster in chains. Elizabeth replies: “But you do.”

Later, cast out and misunderstood due to his monstrous appearance, the creature forms a brief friendship with a blind man (David Bradley), a scene that will be familiar to fans of both 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, through of course del Toro puts his own unique spin on the meeting, including a reading of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, husband of Frankenstein’s original author, Mary Shelley.

Shelley famously wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus before she was 20, a fact of which del Toro reminded viewers during a brief Q&A after the screening.

“That’s the only way she could have done it, being so young,” he said. “Because you ask the most urgent questions then, without trying to figure out who has the answers.”

He continued: “Never has it been so urgent to ask the question that she asked so urgently back then, which is: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human in a time of inhumanity, war, and in a moment of doubt as a race? That was true back then and it’s true right now.”

On a lighter note, the filmmaker noted that “this movie is also the culmination of a long, long — not dating, not a casual fling, but a complete marriage to Toronto.” Del Toro has made many of his films in Toronto, and last month was given the key to the city by Mayor Olivia Chow, who was also at Monday’s screening.

The film features incredible set design, from Frankenstein’s intricate laboratory, set in the base of a Babelesque tower, to a repeated motif of huge round windows, not to mention the creature himself, who looks to have been cast in marble, but proves to be lithe and mobile despite his size.

“I don’t do eye candy; I do eye protein,” del Toro quipped at the screening, adding that the scale of the production was one of the reasons this passion project, pursued for decades, has been so long coming to fruition.

Del Toro said Frankenstein “closes a huge episode in my life,” but the 60-year-old added he’s not done making films yet. He promised “an epic stop motion” adaptation of The Buried Giant, the 2015 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, and a movie with Isaac called Fury.

“Very cruel, very violent,” he said of that one, which is currently in the writing stages. “Like My Dinner with Andre, but killing people.”

Frankenstein came to TIFF with both Venice buzz and general anticipation, and generated one of the festival’s longest rush-ticket lines, a blocks-long queue of those hoping to join the lucky few (OK, about 2,000) inside the Princess of Wales Theatre on Monday.

It gets five more TIFF screenings — one each day from Wednesday through Sunday — before a limited theatrical release on Oct. 17, and a Netflix screening debut on Nov. 7.

Isaac’s performance is wonderful — the day is coming when this performer will live up to his name and win an Oscar — but it’s the creature who really steals the show in Frankenstein.

“Perhaps now we can both be human,” he says in a scene late in the film. Or we can be monsters together. Audiences at the festival seemed ready for both possibilities.

National Post

cknight@postmedia.com