Maybe there were subtle shades of it in The Kissing Booth, or one of its cursed two sequels, but has Jacob Elordi always had sublime levels of thespian sauce? The Australian actor, just 28 years old, was once seen as Hollywood’s new pretty boy and nothing more: the high school jock who could handle that part, whether it was relatively fluffy or it dove into darker terrain (Euphoria). But his credentials have been stacking, and he’s reached something remarkable in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, playing the stitched-together fleshy project of the titular mad scientist.
Truth be told he’s been on this trajectory for a while: Sofia Coppola trusted him with Elvis in her Priscilla; Paul Schrader saw him as an anti-war absconder, the younger version of Richard Gere, in Oh Canada. Everywhere we look, the greats of god-tier cinema think Elordi has something. Del Toro—the Oscar-winning director of The Shape of Water and Pan’s Labyrinth—rightfully did too. He has spent several decades wrapping great actors up in terrifying prosthetics, eliciting interesting performances from them that typically go unnoticed. (Hollywood struggles to see the great actor beneath fantasy prosthetics.) We have seen Frankenstein’s monster before in countless adaptations: the dog-eared suit, bolt-in-the-head man creature, usually green. And while others have played the character as an empty-skulled zombie, Elordi crafts an image of an almost-man learning how to become whole, and experiencing the worst of humanity in that process.
The baroque, cruel world of Guillermo del Toro is a perfect fit for Frankenstein. For so long, his impact has been made using torn-up flesh as a provocative toy, and here it reaches its apex: sawn-off limbs, jaws ripped from skulls, skinned wolves, and exposed eyeballs.
Viktor Frankenstein, here played by a very good Oscar Isaac, is a man with much of the same interests. He’s a scientist who thinks he can achieve the impossible, create life like God, and so—after being cajoled into making it a reality by an ailing doctor (Christoph Waltz)—retreats to a lonely, looming water tower to work that out in peace. Here, from the cadavers of fallen soldiers and executed criminals, he creates his specimen. It’s an at-first worldless, lumbering hunk of flesh which, deep in its eyes somewhere, suggests it has seen some things that have shaped it.
“In Frankenstein’s world, the only way to resolve fear is to destroy what causes it.”
The film, with a prologue and two “tales,”told from Viktor and his creation’s perspectives, charts how such a creature was created, and then what that creature learned about humanity by existing within it. It soon becomes “him,” learning language and how to relate to others. “I want to know who I am,” the monster says, later into the film. He’s too precious for this world, driven to violence only when confronted with it. In Frankenstein’s world, the only way to resolve fear is to destroy what causes it.
And so Elordi’s monster, the film’s beating heart, is forced to absorb that misunderstanding, and the pain of being brought into a world that he, through some cruel twist, cannot escape—even through death. Somehow he manages to be both animalistic, contorting his body like a creature from hell, and a weeping innocent figure from a Botticelli painting. It’s Elordi’s most sublime performance so far; a career-defining role.