Felix Kammerer | Bouquets & Brickbats

25/10/25

Filmhouse, Edinburgh

Guillermo del Toro was always going to make his version of Frankenstein one day – the seeds were sown in his 1992 Spanish-language film, Cronos, the first of his features that I ever saw in the cinema and the one that convinced me he had a big future ahead of him.

Now he’s finally got around to doing the job properly, courtesy of Netflix, who stumped up the $120m budget. For a while it looked as though there wouldn’t be any chance of seeing it in an actual cinema before the transfer to streaming. This would have been a crime because del Toro’s adaptation of the tale looks absolutely sumptuous on the biggest screen at Filmhouse and I’m delighted to see that the auditorium is pretty busy for a Saturday afternoon showing.

Frankenstein is, of course, one of the most filmed books in history, but it’s probably fair to say that only a handful of the 423 movie adaptations (not to mention the 287 TV episodes – yes, I did Google it) have come anywhere close to capturing the essence of Mary Shelley’s seminal horror story. While del Toro does throw in a few original twists of his own (of course he does!), he sticks fairly close to Shelley’s narrative – indeed, he’s even credited her as his co-screenwriter. The tale is told in three distinct parts.

In the opening Prelude, we join Captain Andersen (Lars Mikkelsen) and the crew of his sailing ship, who are stranded on the ice in remote Arctic waters. There’s a sudden explosion nearby, from which the crew rescue Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), who has been pushed almost to the point of death by a monstrous assailant. After witnessing The Creature (Jacob Elordi) plunging into icy waters, they carry Victor onto the ship – but, once revived, he assures Andersen that his pursuer will not actually be dead and will surely come for him…

Before that happens, he needs to tell his story.

Victor then narrates The Creator’s Tale and we flashback back to his childhood where, under the rule of his despotic father, Leopold (Charles Dance), Young Victor (Christian Convery) first becomes obsessed with life and death. Keen-sighted viewers may spot something familiar about Victor’s barely-glimpsed mother, Claire. Something distinctly Oedipal is happening here.

We then cut to some years later. A grown-up Victor is causing controversy at medical school in Edinburgh with the grisly experiments he’s conducting on cadavers (and I get to revisit some of the sets that were evident around my home city in September 2024). We are introduced to Victor’s younger brother, William (Felix Kammerer), and his fiancée, Elizabeth (Mia Goth). We also meet Harlander (Christophe Waltz), a character created for the film, a wealthy man who, for clandestine reasons, is perfectly happy to finance Victor’s attempts to take his experiments all the way.

But Victor’s account is later contrasted with The Creature’s Tale, where we learn of the years when the monster and his creator were apart: how The Creature lived in a barn alongside a kindly blind man (David Bradley); how he mastered the art of speaking (with a distinctly Yorkshire accent); and how he slowly began to realise how shabbily he’d been treated…

It’s not just because I’m a devout Guillermo del Toro fan that I think this film is a million times better than every other Frankenstein-generated movie I’ve watched down the decades. Isaac is a revelation in the title role, nailing both the character’s sense of privilege and his fatal short-sightedness. Elordi, meanwhile, offers a fresh take on the Creature that really brings out his innate vulnerability and his desperate need to relate to others, something that’s been attempted before with much less success.

The film is packed with sumptuous locations and thrilling action set-pieces, that have it hurtling through its lengthy running time. Cinematographer Dan Lausten captures every scene with an almost luminous intensity, Kate Hawley’s costume designs are exquisite, and there’s a beautiful score courtesy of Alexander Desplat. If I have a minor niggle it’s that the CGI-generated wolves in one long sequence aren’t quite as convincing as they need to be – and perhaps both Mia Goth and Felix Kammerer might have been given a little more to do?

But these are nitpicks. As ever in these situations, I’m urging people not to wait for this to drop onto streaming, because this level of filmmaking deserves to be watched on the biggest, brightest screen available, one of – dare I say it? – monstrous proportions.

I’ll get my coat.

4.8 stars

Philip Caveney

05/11/22

Netflix

Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, first published in 1923, was that rarest of things – a runaway bestseller that carried at its heart a powerful anti-war message. In 1930 it was adapted into a movie, directed by Lewis Milestone, and it easily won that year’s Oscar for best film. In 1979, a pedestrian TV version struggled to compete with what had gone before and is now pretty much forgotten. It would be a brave soul indeed who thought they could do anything fresh with the subject.

Hats off then to writer/director Edward Berger, who steps gamely up to the diving board and takes a headlong plunge. Here is a version of the tale that doubles down on the futility of warfare and is able to depict the full visceral horror of life and death in the trenches in ways that Milestone would never have been allowed to in the 1920s.

We begin with a chilling scene of hundreds of dead German soldiers in the aftermath of a battle. We see their uniforms bieng stripped from them, then taken away to be laundered and packaged. Next we encounter our hero, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), still a naïve teenage schoolboy. He and his classmates are swept up in the idea of being heroes for a just cause and can’t wait to enlist, to do their duty. But all too soon, they arrive on the Western Front, unwittingly wearing the dead men’s uniforms, and begin to realise that all their childish fantasies are about to be torn to pieces by the bloody conflict around them.

The set pieces that follow make for harrowing viewing. The battle scenes are epic in scale, brilliantly captured by James Friend’s cinematography, and Berger doesn’t flinch from depicting scenes of utter carnage. An extended sequence where Paul’s battalion encounters tanks for the first time is particularly memorable – but there are quieter scenes too. Paul’s growing friendship with his comrade ‘Kat’ (Albrect Schuch) is expertly drawn, and the regular cutaways to politician Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), frantically trying to negotiate a truce as yet another brutal conflict approaches, add notes of suspense. Of course, we all know where this is leading. Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score contributes to the growing sense of unease.

Milestone’s iconic ending (taken from the novel) is so well known, I completely understand why Berger chose not to use it. In this version, he offers a desperate race against time, which may lack the elegance of the original concept, but the utter futility of the situation is once again brought to the fore and it makes for a powerful conclusion.

I can hardly recommend this as an uplifting watch – indeed, there are moments here that make me want to look away. But the novel’s original message is still very much in evidence.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney