![\"Oscar](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/665b5627-cc32-4b99-8585-6409b9885768.jpg\")
<\/p>\nCan Guillermo del Toro raise the dead? Next to Martin Scorsese, del Toro is cinema\u2019s leading resurrectionist. After reviving the studio fairytale of the 1940s in Pan\u2019s Labyrinth, the Hammer House of Horror with Crimson Peak and the creature features of the Cold War with his Oscar winner The Shape of Water, he has returned to the granddaddy of all monster tales, Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein, to see if he can bring a flush to its corpse-white cheek. <\/p>\n
For the most part the answer is yes \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s alive!\u201d \u2014 although it takes a while to find a pulse. For the first hour we must hear the story of Victor Frankenstein, misunderstood rich kid who loses his mother in childbirth and so resolves to conquer death. All this is very neat and rooted in Shelley\u2019s novel \u2014 she lost her mother, as well as multiple infants, before concocting her tale of parenthood run amok. <\/p>\n
But there the Freudianism was latent, whereas del Toro is all about lavish display, from his million-dollar sets to the beautiful chartreuse gown worn by Victor\u2019s sister-in-law, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), whom we first see, from behind, examining a skull, like a cross between Kim Novak in Vertigo and Hamlet. <\/p>\n
Like everything else in the movie, the shot looks like an exquisite memento mori and the film can feel both a little overstuffed with craft and perilously close to comic. Oscar Isaac\u2019s beetle-browed Victor intones his lines with a fervid intensity, beneath a dark frizz of hair that recalls the ghost not of Shelley but Mel Brooks. <\/p>\n
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Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein<\/p>\n
KEN WORONER\/NETFLIX<\/p>\n
Is there any horror left in Victor\u2019s obsession with reanimating spare parts with lightning? Even with the new wartime setting \u2014 they collect spare parts from the battlefield \u2014 overfamiliarity has drained the story of all possible fright. The blood on Victor\u2019s floor just looks like so much red. <\/p>\n
No matter. Once Jacob Elordi takes the stage as the monster \u2014 sorry, the creature \u2014 everything falls into place. It\u2019s always the way of del Toro: the monsters are better than the men.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n And the creature\u2019s story turns out to be far more interesting than his creator\u2019s. Moving with the grace of a Japanese butoh dancer, wrapped in only a loincloth, his bluish-pale skin crisscrossed with fine scars, this very human monster investigates his surroundings with the gingerliness of a newborn. Elordi\u2019s soulful eyes do the lion\u2019s work as he encounters water, sunlight, or the sight of his own face in a mirror.<\/p>\n Previous film adaptations sought only to horrify, but del Toro\u2019s creature, like the novel\u2019s, is as thoughtful as that French philosopher Rousseau as he explores a forest, becomes one with the other creatures, is befriended by a blind cottager and learns to speak. Boris Karloff gave us the best monster but Elordi gives us the best version of what Shelley had in mind, and in its latter stages del Toro\u2019s film has all the innocence of fable. <\/p>\n Who cares, by this point, about the deprivations of Victor\u2019s childhood? There\u2019s room for only one coming-of-age story here, and it\u2019s the guy with the soulful eyes, bluish skin and spare parts up the wazoo. Andrew Garfield and Julia Roberts in After the Hunt<\/p>\n COURTESY OF AMAZON MGM STUDIOS<\/p>\n \u201cWhen did offending someone become the pre-eminent cardinal sin?\u201d wonders Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), the young hotshot professor at the centre of a maelstrom of accusations in Luca Guadagnino\u2019s After the Hunt. The accusation is levelled by one of his PhD students, Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), after a drunken party at the house of the philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts). <\/p>\n \u2022 Julia Roberts interview: \u2018Hollywood\u2019s still super-male \u2014 but I\u2019m without fear\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n Withholding whether there is anything to the accusation or not, Nora Garett\u2019s script plays the dilemma as a he-said-she-said conversation piece in which we are supposed to feel the fur fly between the snowflake sensitivities of Gen Z and the entitled defiance of their elders, with the preponderance of the script\u2019s zingers going to the latter. <\/p>\n \u201cNot everything is supposed to make you comfortable,\u201d Alma snaps at Maggie at one point and nor does the film, with its annoyingly atonal score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, calculated ambiguities and spiky performance from Roberts, wearing a white houndstooth blazer, flats and minimal make-up. <\/p>\n
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15, 149min<\/p>\n![\"Andrew](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/10e2b0d3-6675-4d27-a231-3886a9303a0e.jpg\")
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