‘Frankenstein’: Ivory bleeds, magnificently

I always pity those who watch films with reviewers — poor souls, made to endure tiny notepads and tinier grunts of disapproval, hungry for flaws.

But some 20 minutes into Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’, I found myself abandoning the notepad altogether. Not because the film is flawless (it isn’t), but because the film is so steeped in its own ache, so deliberate in every trembling frame, that critique begins to feel like vandalism.

You simply surrender, the way one returns to a lover they know will ruin them.

Del Toro has been haunted by the lore of Frankenstein since boyhood. And now, the Creature has risen, played by Jacob Elordi — a 6-foot-5 apparition of impossible symmetry. Elordi, who usually walks through films as if evolution paused to admire him, is here reassembled from death.

His Creature isn’t rag-stitched or crude — he gleams. His face, too seamless, looks less hand-sewn and more engineered.

The production mirrors this ethos: stitched together from excess, fever, and forgotten prayers. One can almost picture Del Toro clutching his Oscar and whispering to studio heads, “Now let me build my monster.” They obliged — and oh, how they paid out of their coffers.

Every set drips with haunted opulence; every shadow looks rehearsed. ‘Frankenstein’ is a cathedral to Del Toro’s own myth, and perhaps that’s why it works, despite its long-winded parts.

The first half unfolds as Dr Victor Frankenstein’s (Oscar Isaac) confession — or maybe his defence. He recounts (for a little too long) his childhood beneath the tyranny of a father who prized precision above tenderness, and his beloved mother who died birthing his brother — an act that becomes his lifelong heresy to undo. The boy grows into a man hungry to challenge divine law.

“There is no emotion in muscle,” Victor’s doctor father tells him during a quiz, a stick to the face as penance for every wrong answer. “Ivory does not bleed.”

But in Del Toro’s hands, it does — magnificently, grotesquely. Young Victor dreams of a dark angel, and spends the rest of his life in his pursuit of immortality.

This is not horror in the cheap sense. It houses no jump-scares, and little gore. ‘Frankenstein’ is a slow rot gilded in gold: sorrow is filmed as ceremony, and blood pools on ice like silk so fine God herself wove it.

But, “God is inept”, Victor says, and the film seems to agree — for the real horror is not flesh and gore, but manicured and perfumed human ambition.

Casting Elordi seems enviously conspicuous. Even through gauze and gore, the Creature remains too beautiful to despise — and that is the point. The monstrosity’s Luciferian yet empathetic grace unsettles. Beauty as contagion, ruin as rapture.

Isaac, brilliant as ever, plays Victor like a man gnawed by his own genius, while the film manages to coax out every ounce of brilliance from horror veteran Mia Goth (yes, that is her birth name), who plays Victor’s brother’s fiancee Elizabeth, who the charlatan doctor is in love with.

Del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ asks not whether man can play God, but whether beauty itself is the truest horror. For all its excesses, it is cinema at its most alive. Because, in this strange resurrection, ivory finally bleeds.