Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo del Toro has birthed a monster with his new big-budget “Frankenstein” movie and joked Saturday that the effort had left him worn out ahead of the world premiere in Venice.
The Hollywood version of the Mary Shelley masterpiece from Del Toro — winner of the 2018 best picture Oscar for “The Shape of Water” — is an elaborate, evocative production the director said he’s been dreaming about making since he was a child.
“I’ve been following the creature since I was a kid,” the director told a press conference at the Venice Film Festival ahead of the premiere.
“I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively and in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world,” Del Toro said.
“And now I’m in post-partum depression.”
The Netflix-produced film — which will have a limited theatrical release in October — is one of 21 movies in the main competition vying for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion.
Starring Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creation, the film is a no-holds-barred Gothic spectacle as it follows scientist Frankenstein driven by an obsession to invent his own living creature, and the aftermath of that all-consuming hubris.
Exploring themes of humanity, vengeance and unbridled will, the film spares no expense in its visuals, whether the imposing tower where Frankenstein performs his experiments or the gruesome anatomical bits from which his monster is stitched together.
“In you I have created something horrible,” Frankenstein tells his creature.
“Someone,” his creature replies.
Since the seminal 1931 “Frankenstein” film starring Boris Karloff, there have been countless adaptations, underscoring the appeal of the story, including “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” of 1994 from Kenneth Branaugh, and Mel Brook’s 1974 “Young Frankenstein”.
For Del Toro, Mary Shelley’s novel tries to answer the question “What is it to be human?”, he told journalists.
“I think that the movie tries to show imperfect characters and the right we have to remain imperfect. And the right we have to understand each other under the most oppressive of circumstances,” he said.
“And there’s no more urgent task than to remain human in a time where everything is pushing towards a bipolar understanding of our humanity,” he said, speaking of the modern world.
– Dark Danish humour –
“Frankenstein” is the biggest production premiereing Saturday, but “The Last Viking” by Danish director and writer Anders Thomas Jensen and “Below the Clouds” by Italian documentary maker Gianfranco Rosi drew enthusiastic applause in their press screenings.
“The Last Viking” is a darkly comic, sometimes disturbing and mad-cap drama about mental health and identity politics, featuring Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen as a suicidal man with a personality disorder.
“Below the Clouds” is a sumptous black-and-white rendering of the gritty and historic Italian port of Naples by Rosi, one of Europe’s most acclaimed documentary makers who won the main prize in Venice in 2013 with “Sacro GRA”.
Saturday will also see a protest in Venice against Israel’s siege of Gaza called by left-wing poitical groups in northeast Italy.
The Gaza war was one of the main talking points in the lead up to the festival due to an open letter denouncing the Israeli government and calling on the festival to speak out.
The letter, drafted by a group of independent directors called Venice4Palestine, has garnered more than 2,000 signatures from film professionals, organisers told AFP.
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