Lifeless romanticism

Can you even begin to imagine if man were capable of bringing a rotting lifeless lump to life? I can’t either because Guillermo del Toro sure couldn’t. Frankenstein (2025, del Toro) is a remake no one asked for dull trite adaptation with yet another daddy issues backstory and adds new characters that add nothing to the story why? To pad its run time? To help modern audiences find one of the oldest most enduring classic easiest to read not even that long of a novel written by an eighteen year old girl’s story easier to comprehend? Because striving impossibly to please his dead father explains Victor Frankenstein better? 

     Around midway through the movie Victor goes to a battlefield to scavenge cadavers for his reanimation experiment when he remarks to his assistant to only be concerned with looking for taller specimens because “larger limbs are easier to work with.” Bigger is not always better. That sums up del Toro’s problem—throwing a lavish budget full of stupid CG effects two and a half hours long into a prestige pic unnecessarily on source material already brilliantly handled in 1990 by no less than Frank Henelotter and Tim Burton respectively. 
     But the worst is the moralizing. The Elordi Creature is this altruistic peaceful zen compassionate empath who befriends rats and even has a scene where he’s bonding with Bambi when some hunters show up and gun him down. That’s del Toro’s other problem. Queerbaiting. He paints evil heteronormative coded villains against other coded as The Elordi Creature says “the way of the world it will hunt you and kill you just for being the way you are” heroes. But it’s all so watered down generic one wonders at the mind that would think even a child needs to be taught it’s wrong to hate a sweet kind friendly generous charismatic innocent person for being themselves. Fomenting the cult of oppression. If it were woven into the subtext it’d be rad. Might even be beautiful. But not this way. Not as desperately contrived underdeveloped as it is here.
     Mia Goth plays a nun who’s been in a convent her whole life and is engaged to be married only a week after entering the outside world then encounters The Elordi Creature chained up in the basement unable to articulate any semblance of language and she instantly falls madly in love with him. Because del Toro’s trying to sell this star-crossed beautiful movie star teen romance between a virgin saint and a martyr who’s persecuted for being smartquotes different is too vague to mean anything. Del Toro doesn’t even bother to take the time to establish any chemistry between them. Nor that society can’t accept The Elordi Creature’s otherness. Just because some random hunters freaked out and shot at him doesn’t mean the world hates him and denies his right to exist. But that’s what this movie wants. What it expects us to believe. So sure. Why not?
     Also in del Toros’ version The Elordi Creature has superhero powers and saves everyone and doesn’t regret anything and goes on to fall in love and save the world because everyone deserves to be themselves and in doing so are humanity’s only hope. Okay yes reading identity politics into movies is annoying I promise not to do it anymore except this one time. The moral of the story then is probably I’m the real monster. 
 
10/24/2025 Landmark Midtown Art Cinema
Atlanta, GA

How can a guy get so low? He reached too high

Nightmare Alley (2021, Guillermo del Toro) is a perfect model of the application of genre and setting. Its genre is carnival noir. And its setting is the point between the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of WWII—does this give you an idea of how dark you can expect what follows to be yet?

     The noir angle is more than following good guy STANTON CARLISLE (Bradley Cooper) as he turns bad. It’s the empty desperation within the lives of its characters. And, there’s a tangible, prevalent sense of the dread that all of them are on the grift; and in constant danger of being found out, betrayed, exploited, of in some form violently or mortally wounded by each other. Also, there’s this uneasiness about how the trades by which they earn their living are low, cheap, filthy—and Americans line up for more every time. 

     The carnival angle is built to function as a way for us the audience to see backstage, giving us access to fascinatingly detailed instructional histories of the procedures, purpose, psychology, and day to day operation of select attractions. It also evokes this contrast between the subculture of entertainers who are at once aware that they’re bottom rung and not good enough for anything else in life, and their ability to keep an inherent goodness and warmth between themselves intact. Okay but yeah, also carnivals are weird. They’re scary. Grotesque. They straddle the definitions of traveling and transient. They’re often shut down by the cops. 

     Nightmare Alley is also consciously and unsparingly nasty. It’s exceedingly violent. With scenes of disturbingly graphic, gnarly disfigurement, and shockingly in your face carnage, there’s little that happens offscreen and left to the imagination. But this suits the material. In fact, all of the creative choices have been done with care for the source, and considerable attention given to the audience. What a show.

 

12/15/2021 AMC Phipps 14

Atlanta, GA

DCP