Netflix revealed the first footage from Guillermo del Toro’s passion project, “Frankenstein,” which he wrote, directed and produced. And it is a doozy.
As part of Wednesday’s Next on Netflix event in Los Angeles, the streaming giant previewed a little more than two minutes of footage from the upcoming movie, which will debut this November. The footage opens with Dr. Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) attempting to reanimate a partial corpse in an operating theater. A bunch of Victorian doctors tut-tut his experiment, which involves a torso and head (it almost looks like a classic automaton).
Christoph Waltz shows up saying that he will give the frazzled young doctor unlimited resources, and we see Frankenstein surveying a battlefield, picking out parts. (There is a particularly grisly moment where we see the doctor slicing through muscle like it’s roast beef.) There are glimpses of the operating table and the creature, all cobbled-together. The doctor pounds violently on the chest of the monster, but it will not wake up.
Then Frankenstein wakes in fright and there, at the end of his bed, is the creature played by Jacob Elordi. That begins a montage of images – a woman in a casket, a castle in the ice, and finally, a better look at the creature’s face, as he says to a group in a bar, that he is going to “tell his story.”
The creature looks heavily inspired by the illustrations of Bernie Wrightson, which was first published by Marvel Comics in 1983 – stringy black hair, his face and body thin and sinewy, with deep, soulful eyes.
Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” looks lush and operatic; the closest thing in the filmmaker’s catalogue is probably 2015’s underrated Gothic romance “Crimson Peak.” There is a strong sense of color-coding – beyond the red flesh and the doctor’s red scarf, he also has red gloves and, in another scene, a young woman in a white casket has a blood red pillow propping up her head. The footage was scored to Polish composer Wojciech Kilar’s score for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” which only added to the oversized monster movie vibes.
Before the presentation, in a video intro, del Toro described the project as a nearly lifelong dream, and that, in many ways, it is his most autobiographical film. This is clearly one of the biggest cinematic events of the year – on streaming or otherwise.
“Frankenstein” comes alive this November.
