Each year, I decide how much value I place on industry awards and accolades based on whether I agree with their nomination choices. This year, they are good and valid, because Frankenstein is already being recognized by the Golden Globes, the Gotham Awards, countless end-of-year “best” lists, and the like. Martin Scorsese has dreams about it, and I can’t imagine an honor higher than that. Since its release on Netflix, Frankenstein has been one of the top movies on the platform, thanks in part to the many times I’ve already watched it myself. I’m in love with it, of course. I, like director Guillermo del Toro, feel a deep connection to the beauty found in the monstrous, and in turn, Guillermo del Toro, like myself, is a real Gothic girlie.
This story is about Victor Frankenstein and the man he brings into the world, so of course, the film delves heavily into the complexities of father/son dynamics, to a moving emotional effect. But while I’m not a father or a son, I am a woman, and I find del Toro’s female characters more compelling than many written by men (an accomplishment that shouldn’t be as rare as it is). Frankenstein came from the mind of a young woman, so it’s impossible to ever divorce gender from the story, and the way this adaptation, through the dual roles of Mia Goth, frames the importance of femininity and the dangers of its absence, is a highlight of this Gothic masterpiece.
Goth appears first as Claire Frankenstein, the mother Victor adores. That worship is made all the more understandable when the young boy’s father is cold and abusively domineering. Sadly, we’ll never know what kind of man Victor would have become if his mother had lived, because Claire died giving birth to her son William. With nowhere else for Victor’s love for her to go, the desperate need to have his mother back distorts itself into an obsessive determination to control nature — that unfeeling thing that took her away from him. Victor is a being prone to obsession, and by his own admission, when he loves, he does so possessively. When his father wasn’t at home, Victor explains, “…Mother was mine.”
As a grown man, although brilliant, all the anger and arrogance that surfaced after Victor’s mother’s death have metastasized inside of him. Some of my favorite moments of Oscar Isaac’s performance throughout the movie are when we can see flashes of the wounded boy Victor used to be — and in many ways still is — in his eyes. Dr. Frankenstein is still maniacally focused on creating life, no matter the cost, and without care for the potential consequences. It’s this man who meets Elizabeth Lavenza (Mia Goth again), the niece of his benefactor Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) and the fiancée of his brother William (Felix Kammerer).
As a man who already drinks a disturbing amount of milk, we can guess how Victor reacts to a woman who looks strikingly similar to his mother: he covets her attention and love immediately. From their very first interaction, Elizabeth intuits the absolute insanity and callousness of Victor’s plan to defy nature. She likens Victor to the same men who send soldiers out to suffer and die in pointless wars. Of course, it’s a woman who empathizes with those who are stripped of their humanity and seen only as bodies for men to do with as they please.
Elizabeth doesn’t dislike Victor exactly. (At least, not from his point of view. This is “Victor’s Story,” remember, and even he admits that it’s not all fact.) Yes, she absolutely eviscerates his character to his face in a church confessional, but it’s the most lighthearted and funny scene in the movie, and the two bond immediately afterwards. Elizabeth harbors a love for science as well, in the form of her fascination with insects, which, like Victor’s anatomical experiments, many others fail to notice the allure of. But Victor is a man who doesn’t know how to cope when things don’t go his way, so when Elizabeth makes it clear that their relationship will never be romantic, the momentary pause in achieving his single-minded goal is over, and he turns his back on the influence of her gentle strength. He’s off to the battlefield, collecting dead soldiers that he’ll hack to pieces in order to lovingly craft the body he will shock to life. While Victor initially basks in the wonder of the son he brought into being, he soon falls into the abusive patterns of the father he despised, but Elizabeth will be the one to see the true beauty in the Creature (Jacob Elordi).
It’s by design that the scenes between Elizabeth and the Creature feel different than any others in Frankenstein. Guillermo del Toro explained that whenever they were together, he shot “…at 36 frames per second so I could slow down certain moments/Gestures (wedding dress moth flutter float) or speed them (her face trembling in glove scene) and you can feel that effect leaning on every emotional beat…” Elizabeth is first drawn to the Creature’s voice, and when she sees him, she only hesitates for a moment before reaching her hand out to his. Reminiscent of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, her touch gives the Creature life he didn’t have before. (As much as Victor tried, it’s impossible, as it turns out, to truly create life without a woman.) And the Creature, in turn, makes Elizabeth feel alive in a way she never has before. The moment the Creature lifts Elizabeth’s veil away from her face, and their soft exploration of each other is the first time she’s ever truly revealed herself to anyone. The Creature slides one of Elizabeth’s gloves from her hand, and in addition to its innocence, Jacob Elordi describes it as deeply romantic as well. Luckily for us all, the Gothic is unafraid to sit with potentially uncomfortable complexity like this, so Elizabeth can feel both maternal and sensual feelings towards this man she could never imagine, but realizes she’s always wanted.
And that leaf. Even someone who hasn’t seen Frankenstein yet has surely come across clips and fan art from this scene. Elizabeth can’t sleep knowing the Creature is imprisoned and alone, so she sneaks down to him, and the two just exist with each other. Unlike Victor, Elizabeth has no expectations of who and what the Creature must be, and she’s happy to meet him where he is. Grateful for this nurturing, the Creature gifts Elizabeth the only thing he can — one of the leaves he picked up from the floor of the cell he’s chained in. She gives him something, too. Without tyrannical paternalism hanging over his head, the Creature finally learns to speak another word: Elizabeth. It’s not just the name of the woman who had the patience and kindness to teach him, it’s also the term he’s come to equate with feeling safe and cared for.
Elizabeth’s surety that there is something pure about the Creature beyond what others may see as monstrous is mocked by Victor, still stinging from her rejection and bitterly jealous that she’s formed a bond he doesn’t understand with someone he thinks of as unworthy of her attention. He could never understand, of course, because Victor only sees Elizabeth in relation to himself. The Creature sees her for her, and so she is herself with him. She’s supposed to marry William, but we never see enough of them together to suggest that either has any particularly passionate feelings for the other. William is a rich man, and he needs a wife. And any interest Elizabeth may have had for Victor was destroyed by the cruelty she watched him inflict on his son. On her wedding day, she mourns as she looks at the leaf she’s cherished, given to her by the only man she wants to be with.
In a way, Elizabeth does become the Creature’s bride when the two are reunited upon his arrival at the Frankenstein estate to ask Victor for a companion. But their relief at being together again is tragically short-lived. In a fury, Victor orders Elizabeth to move out of the way as he raises a gun to the Creature, but she does not, and is shot in the stomach for stepping in front of him. You’ve got to wonder exactly who that bullet was truly intended for. Victor knows that the Creature’s wounds heal almost instantaneously, so did he truly believe that shooting the Creature would end things, or is there a part of him (whether he’s conscious of it or not) that was willing to sacrifice Elizabeth to the altar of his pain? How dare another woman he loves leave him? And to cast him aside for that thing? She’d hardly be the first woman to be a victim of wounded male pride.
All of Guillermo del Toro’s best visual strengths are on full display in the next scene, as the Creature carries Elizabeth away at her request, framed by the shocked faces of wedding guests and fluttering flower petals. Tragically romantic, these two soulmates are together at last, but only for a brief moment. Right before she dies in the snowy cave that acts as their sanctuary, Elizabeth tells the Creature, “I sought and longed for something I could not quite name. But in you I found it.” The women who love stories like this well understand the desire for a “monster” who is less monstrous than many of the other men they encounter. For this reason, it’s no surprise to me that so much of the profusive love for Frankenstein has been from female fans.
Of course, the novel was written by Mary Shelley, but it would be reductive to say that a teenage girl author accounts for that entirely, especially when this adaptation was written and directed by a man, and makes numerous significant changes from the source material. What Guillermo del Toro shows us with Elizabeth, whose role he greatly expanded from the book, is a depiction of why many women have always been drawn to the things shoved to the margins and branded as horrific. In the toxicity of patriarchal society, the feminine suffers the same fate, and like Elizabeth for the Creature, we yearn for something different.
Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix.