Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein: The Reluctant Monster Movie

In recent years, the Frankenstein story has experienced a resurgence, from the gonzo semi-satire Poor Things, to metafiction like Anne Eekhout’s Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein, to a host of new feminist and queer scholarship. Maybe it’s because of post-pandemic uncertainty, or the looming threat of our own self-destruction via climate change, but for whatever reason, the story now holds a new, even deeper resonance. So, I decided to revisit the film widely seen as the most straightforward, faithful adaptation of the original novel: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), directed by Kenneth Branagh. This year, that film celebrates its thirty-year anniversary, and seen again today, it is a bizarre experience, a movie at war with its own genre. Every element suggests an attempt to escape the monster movie we know in favor of a refined, prestige adaptation. It stars Robert de Niro and Branagh, with Francis Ford Coppola producing and a script from Frank Darabont, the man behind The Shawshank Redemption. Every name screams award-worthy. It also features elegant period costumes, a sweeping score from two-time Oscar nominee Patrick Doyle, and gorgeous Alpine scenery straight out of The Sound of Music. Not to mention that it is an adaptation of one of the most highly regarded novels in the English language. 

The one problem Branagh’s film faces is that several dozen other adaptations have come first, and those adaptations are far from prestige productions. The name Frankenstein, to many audiences, is synonymous with monster schlock: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Abbot and Costello, the Munsters. Yes, we still read the novel in school, but what we remember is a mute killing machine, a mad doctor, Igor the hunchbacked henchman, and angry villagers burning a windmill. Hollywood’s Frankenstein, like it or not, has left a much stronger legacy, one the Branagh film seems both repulsed and fascinated by. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein veers wildly back and forth between quiet, subtle, and relatively faithful to the novel, and gleefully bombastic and ghoulish. It even departs from the novel in several new, even more gruesome ways, as though attempting to outdo the competition. Perhaps Branagh and Co. simply wanted to honor both the novel and previous adaptations. But more likely, I think there really was a desire to be, first and foremost, subtle and faithful to Shelley. Commercial interests most likely caused the film to stray from this. If a film is called Frankenstein, people want Frankenstein. They expect over-the-top, bizarre thrills. So, what we get is two films in one. Both are enjoyable, but it’s hard not to wish we’d gotten one complete vision instead. 

The tension starts right with the film’s opening titles. Shelley herself is quoted in a melodramatic voiceover: “I busied myself to think of a story which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror. One to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” It’s like the opening of an especially flowery B-movie: the title zooms at the screen, while angelic music plays, like an early 2000s 3-D film. It’s enjoyably bonkers, but doesn’t lend itself to a film we’re supposed to take seriously. Then we get an opening crawl, explaining that we are at the dawn of the nineteenth century, an era of unbridled technological growth and exploration. This is essentially a recap of Shelley’s Romantic themes, but still, it is a bit self-serious. Next comes one of the novel’s most frequently excised scenes, its framing device. We’re introduced to Robert Walton (Aidan Quinn), the leader of a sailing expedition to the Arctic, who quickly gets stuck in the ice and meets the near-dead Victor Frankenstein. Victor, on hearing of Walton’s obsession with reaching the pole, begins telling Walton his life story, in an attempt to dissuade him. We learn of Victor’s idyllic childhood, spent with his cousin and eventual love interest, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter). Victor’s mother dies, prompting an obsession with science and the possibility of cheating death, and Victor heads off to college, picking up a sidekick, Clerval (Tom Hulce). 

All this is largely faithful, but it’s here that the film begins to shift. The shots in the first half hour are reserved and intimate, with occasional expansive views of the landscape, matching the majesty of nature that Shelley is so in awe of. But once Victor arrives at school and begins his unholy experiments, the shots get crazier, with sudden zoom-ins, quick cuts, and long tracking shots through Victor’s laboratory. Branagh’s acting, previously restrained, gets more frenetic. During the creation scene, he races around shirtless and gleaming with sweat, giggling madly, and yelling, “Live, live, live!” It’s not Colin Clive, but it certainly is modeled more after Hollywood’s mad doctor than Shelley’s tortured protagonist. 

The staging of the creation itself goes even further, trying to not only imitate, but one-up previous adaptations. It’s not just lightning, but electric eels that bring the spark of life to the Creature. It’s not just a single rising operating table, but a massive Rube Goldberg machine Victor swings and climbs through like Tarzan. Victor doesn’t just collect dead body parts, but buckets and buckets of amniotic fluid from local delivery rooms, which he uses to fill a giant sarcophagus, his own twisted version of a womb. This does, of course, call back to Shelley’s novel. The idea of the Creation as a warped form of birth has always been present in the story, and is in fact a central part of the recent wave of new queer criticism. But that connection is hard to take seriously in the film when the visual elements are all pure Gothic pulp. Even the classic “It’s alive” line is included, almost out of obligation. There are moments of tenderness, like a long zoom-in on Branagh’s facial expression as he shifts from elated to horrified at his success. But it’s almost laughable when you remember that he’s shirtless and soaked in amniotic fluid. 

         The film does attempt to revert to seriousness, as we enter the Creature’s perspective. De Niro brings a new gravitas to the character, and the film includes much more of the Creature’s life as the unknown guest of a woodland cottage family than most adaptations have. The music quiets down. The editing gets slower and less distracting. De Niro’s acting can breathe. But the traditional horror editing eventually returns. The Creature kills the cottagers’ cruel landlord before he can evict them, in a remarkably traditional jump-scare. When the cottagers inevitably turn on him, he begins grunting and screaming, “I will have my vengeance!” directly at the camera. There’s a sudden, harsh zoom-in, as the cottage burns in the background to a loud, menacing drumbeat. This returns the film fully to exaggerated campiness. It’s lots of fun, but it is sad to see the humanity of De Niro’s acting disappear. 

The remainder of the film continues this pattern as the Creature seeks vengeance on Victor,, retaining many key elements of Shelley’s text, but coating them with layers of monster film pulp. A key character death is changed from an anguished, protracted execution following a trial to an immediate hanging by an angry mob, clearly imitating the angry villager trope established by the original James Whale Frankenstein. The Creature, as in the book, calls Victor to a meeting at the top of a glacier, but the film adds in another jump scare, and a bizarre Ice Age-style slide through a frozen cave. And actors like Hulce and Carter shift from their prestige film personas to the bizarre, campy freaks they are also known for playing. 

I will not reveal the film’s most infamous changes, which occur during the finale, but they straddle these two warring sides of the film as well. They result from actions that can be seen as in character for Victor, but they also unmistakably only serve to be shocking and disturbing. These changes also rely heavily on classic horror tropes—I saw shades of everything from Pet Sematary to Daphne Murier’s Rebecca. The gruesome absurdity of it all is, again, fun. But one does have to wonder, is this the closest to a faithful Frankenstein that we’re likely to get? The novel had a unique blend of the outlandish and subtle that is hard to replicate in the medium of film. Movies require much greater resources to produce, and thus are much more at the mercy of commercial demands. Something like Poor Things may have achieved a balance of disparate tones, but it did so by going in its own, uniquely weird direction, merely taking light influence from Frankenstein. When it comes to Frankenstein itself, however, people know Hollywood’s version. Was catering to it the necessary sacrifice the Branagh film had to make, in order to be as faithful as it was?