Frankenstein: Less than the sum of its parts

Frankenstein (2025) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for bloody violence, gore and grisly images

Available via: Movie theaters and Netflix

By Derrick Bang

If this film doesn’t win an Academy Award for Tamara Deverell’s stunning production design, there is no justice.

 

Although initially delighted that he has brought life to a creation (Jacob Elordi, center) 
stitched together from scores of corpses, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) just as
quickly worries that he may have made a colossal mistakes.

And if the Oscars included a category for atmospheric dread, director/scripter Guillermo del Toro also would have that one locked up. He has been unsettling viewers since 1997’s Mimic and particularly 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth. And only del Toro could have jump-started the goofy 1950s Creature from the Black Lagoon franchise, and transformed it into 2017’s brilliantly disorienting The Shape of Water, winning Oscars for Best Picture and Director in the process.

All this said, I wish del Toro had matched his new film’s visual dazzle with a similarly exhilarating script. His take has about as much in common with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 Gothic masterpiece, as director James Whale’s 1931 adaptation. 

 

Which is to say, del Toro has taken serious liberties with the original plot and character roster. A few high points remain faithful to Shelley’s novel — along with occasional references to Prometheus, as befit the subtitle of Shelley’s novel (“The Modern Prometheus”) — but for the most part del Toro merely borrows the concept of Frankenstein and his monster.

 

That would be fine, if the results were more consistently engaging. At times — and I can’t believe I’m saying this about a del Toro film — the narrative is protracted and boring. As often has been the case with other filmmakers, one must be cautious about embarking upon a pet project which — in del Toro’s own words — has been a “quest” ever since he saw Whale’s film for the first time, at age 7.

 

Del Toro has moved the timeline half a century forward, to allow the key players a greater understanding of advances in electricity. The saga therefore begins in 1857, with a prelude aboard the Royal Danish Navy ship Horisont, trapped in arctic ice while hoping to reach the North Pole. While attempting to free the ship, crew members spot a badly injured man, and bring him aboard.

 

He barely has time to introduce himself as Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), before the ship is attacked by a powerful, towering creature that demands Victor be surrendered to him. Ship’s Captain Andersen (Lars Mikkelsen) refuses, and six of his men are killed in the subsequent violent melee; the creature withstands all manner of gunshots and other damage.

 

The calmly resolute Andersen wins the moment only after using his blunderbuss to shatter the ice beneath the monster’s feet. It sinks into the icy waters.

 

“It’ll be back,” Frankenstein warns. “It can’t be killed.”

 

Eden: Paradise Lost

Eden (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong violence, sexual content, graphic nudity and frequent profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Director Ron Howard — whose résumé leans toward uplifting, can-do dramas such as Apollo 13, Cinderella Man and Rush — seems a very odd choice for this fact-based saga of deplorable, depraved and misanthropic human behavior.

 

Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and longtime companion Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) are
less than thrilled, when they suddenly must share their island with a family of
know-nothing newcomers.

What has been dubbed “The Galapagos Mystery” has fueled numerous documentaries and books, the most recent being author Abbott Kahler’s Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II. The saga has long been well-known across the pond, although this new film likely will arouse interest here in the States.

German physician Friedrich Ritter and his patient-turned-companion, Dore Strauch, were the first “settlers” to arrive on the Galapagos’ Floreana Island in 1929: so chosen since it is one of the few with a (minimal) potable water supply. They spent three contented — if arduous — years as the island’s sole inhabitants. Ritter sent accounts of their lives back to Germany — picked up by occasional passing ships, and then published in newspapers and magazines — and pounded away at an increasingly Nietzschesque manifesto detailing his contempt for mankind.

 

They were joined in 1932 by WWI veteran Heinz Wittmer, his pregnant new wife Margret, and his teenage son Harry, having been inspired by the articles. Although the isolationist Ritter and Strauch likely were annoyed by these “intruders,” they and the Wittmers respected each other’s space.

 

This wary dynamic was completely torpedoed by the next arrivals: Austrian-born Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet, a shameless hedonist accompanied by her two German lovers, Robert Philippson and Rudolf Lorenz, along with an Ecuadorian “worker” named Manuel Borja. Claiming to be a baroness — a title open to historical debate — she systematically bullied and intimidated the others via an insufferably arrogant blend of entitlement, seduction, treachery and a hustler’s talent for exploiting psychological weaknesses.

 

What eventually occurred ... well, that would spoil the story.

 

Howard and co-scripter Noah Pink dumped an intriguing ensemble cast into this combustible brew of jealousy, resentment and worse, although some play their roles better than others. Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby aren’t entirely successful with their German accents, as Ritter and Strauch, although they otherwise slide deftly into the sort of eccentric tics and mannerisms that would be expected of a couple isolated for so long.

 

Law looks appropriately rugged and hardy, and he puts considerable grim intensity into Ritter’s contemptuous denouncements. Kirby’s Strauch is softer, with a fondness for the burro that ferries their heavier goods; she also limps painfully, having embraced this rustic lifestyle in the hope that her multiple sclerosis will go into remission.

 

Law plays Ritter as an obstinate fanatic; Kirby is more nuanced. Strauch tends to walk around barefoot; the first of this film’s many wince-inducing moments comes during the couple’s evening ritual, as Ritter carefully digs parasitic insects out of Strauch’s skin.