Butler's Cinema Scene

Jacob Elordi

“FRANKENSTEIN” *My rating: B+ (Netflix)

149 minutes | MPAA: R

For the first hour or so Guillermo del Toro’s new (and let’s face it, ultimate) version of “Frankenstein” left me a bit cold.

It’s been brilliantly designed and photographed but emotionally…kinda meh.  

Turns out I just had to show a little patience.  For once the Creature comes to life, so does the movie.

Indeed, our sympathies lie with none of the human characters…least of all Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein, the ruthless and ego-driven medical genius bent on reanimating dead corpses.

No, this “Frankenstein” belongs to Jacob Elordi’s Creature…and please note that he will not be described here as “the Monster.”  For this stitched-together superman exhibits more pure humanity than any of the “normal” folk around him.  It’s a performance that transcends the scars and death-blue pallor of the Creature’s skin to reveal, well, a beautiful soul.

Expect an Oscar nomination for Elordi, a screen heartthrob and sexual icon (“Saltburn,” the Max series “Euphoria”) who here shows unpredictable depths of loneliness, love, rage and compassion.

Del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel begins at the end.  The crew of a sailing ship trapped in the Arctic ice take aboard a frostbitten man being pursued by a terrifying giant.  This is Victor Frankenstein, and to the Captain (Lars Mikkelsen) he relates his tale.

We see the boy Victor dealing with his icily controlling and intellectually cruel father (Charles Dance); this helps explain why as an adult Victor is a bit of a medical oddball, convinced of his own brilliance and openly contemptuous of his colleagues.

Victor’s ambitions know no bounds, and with the help of a rich benefactor (Christoph Waltz) — who it turns out has his own twisted motives — our man gets to work sorting through the bodies left on a recent battlefield (the setting is 1850s Europe), looking for pieces that can be sewn together and animated with a jolt of lightening.

When not impersonating God, Victor expresses a bad case of the hots for Elizabeth (Mia Goth), the fiancé of his brother (Felix Kammerer). Clearly he observes few moral boundaries.

Oscar Isaac

That becomes even more clear in his relationship with the Creature.  He keeps his nearly naked (and weirdly erotic) creation chained in the castle basement, where he berates the poor unfortunate for lacking the mental acuity to match his physical power.

It is Elizabeth who breaks through, treating the Creature with kindness and unlocking his emotions and intellect. But exasperated by what he views as a failed experiment, Victor attempts to destroy his creation in a massive conflagration.

Turns out the Creature cannot die, as much as he might wish for it. The second half of the film finds the Creature joining Victor and the captain aboard the ship to explain why he’s been pursuing the semi-mad doctor over land, sea and ice.

It is in the Creature’s backstory that we find grace notes of beauty and longing.  The highlight is his “adoption” of a farm family.  Hiding in their idle gristmill he emerges at night to leave presents of dead game and firewood at their door.  They call their mysterious and unseen benefactor “the spirit of the woods.”  

The Creature’s real education begins when the blind grandfather is left alone and befriends this stranger, teaching him to read (how a blind man teaches someone to read is a poser, but I’m not complaining) and opening up his intellect to literature, history and philosophy.

Maddened by the knowledge of both his “otherness” and his inability to end his miserable existence, the Creature decides on revenge.  He’ll pursue Victor halfway around the world for a final confrontation between father and son.

The old “Bride of Frankenstein” attempted to humanize the Monster (the blind hermit had a brief but telling scene), but the dominant themes of that classic were horror and camp.  Here del Toro goes for an emotional and spiritual catharsis.  That might seem a stretch for what is essentially a horror movie, but damned if he doesn’t pull it off.

In the end we’re left not so much with lingering terror as a disquieting sadness.

Well done.

Julia Garner

“WEAPONS My rating: B (HBO Max)

128 minutes | MPAA rating: R

A long tantalizing  tease capped by a what-the-hell ending pretty much describes every horror movie I’ve seen in recent years.

It’s no different with “Weapons,” writer/director Zach Cregger’s followup to his brutally effective creepfest “Barbarian.”

The film opens with spectacular imagery…at exactly the same moment one fall night, nearly two dozen elementary school students rise from their beds and in their pajamas race away from their  homes with arms stretched at a weird angle…it’s simultaneously scary and beautiful.

Turns out all the missing children were from the class taught by Justine (Julia Garner).  Only one little boy, Alex (Cary Christopher), shows up at school the next day.

The others seem to have vanished without a trace.

The authorities are baffled. The parents frantic…and then vengeful.  They turn on Justine, accusing her of being behind the disappearances/abductions. She’s told to go on hiatus until things settle down.

Cregger’s screenplay tells the story from several different perspectives.  First there’s Justine, whose long-dormant drinking problem gets kicked back into high gear.  There ‘sthe local cop (Alden Ehrenreich) who is part of the search and has a sexual relationship with Justine.

Archer (Josh Brolin) is one of the parents, driven to acts of desperation by the loss of his son.

Marcus (Benedict Wong) is the principal, trying to keep a lid on the town’s boiling emotions.

Austin Abrams is a young drug addict pulled into the mystery.

And finally there’s little Alex, whose home life harbors a dark secret.

Amy Madigan

About two-thirds of the way through the film we meet Alex’s Aunt Gladys (a nearly unrecognizable Amy Madigan), who’s just come to town and wears a gosh-awful orange wig that makes her look like a septagenarian Bette Davis after an all-night rave. Gladys is bleakly funny and not a little creepy — you just know she’s got something to do with the mass vanishing.

With its elements of the Pied Piper legend plopped down in contemporary suburbia, “Weapons” certainly grabs our interest and keeps us guessing as to what’s going on.  If the final reveal is a bit underwhelming, Cregger seems to think so, too, because at the last moment “Weapons” shifts from slow-creep dread to over-the-top physical comedy.

Even if the big explanation is a fairy-tale head-slapper, most of “Weapons” is extremely watchable and quite involving.

| Robert W. Butler

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