Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, James McAvoy, Jessica Brown Findlay, Andrew Scott, Freddie Fox, Daniel Mays, Spencer Wilding, Callum Turner, Louise Brealey, Charles Dance, Alistair Petrie, Mark Gatiss, Guillaume Delaunay.
All stories have a beginning, some are forged in the deep recesses of the imagination and some are taken to added upon, made more user friendly for a modern audience who might conceive that the birth of a famous monster should have more to it than meets the initial eye. A succession of films have alluded to the question, one successfully so, but it falls to the screen play writer Max Landis to ask the question outright, just who really was the monster in the marvellous Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein?
Uniquely the film Victor Frankenstein is seen from the perspective of Igor, the curious assistant of the famous Doctor, and whilst it makes for some entertaining viewing, some very good ideas on how a birth can be seen from many different angles, it is a story that arguably ultimately takes the mystery out of the origins of the mad scientist Hell bent on creating a living being from the parts of dead men.
Where the film does succeed is in its own questioning of the vexing subject of humanity’s right to step out of the dogmatic shadows set down by religion. Many of the themes raised, of just how far science may go in creating life, from the squeamish idea of using a bucket, an early kind of IVF and test tube baby, to the modern day example of presumed agreement to the harvesting organs after you have died, are seen in the context of the guise of the Victorian values and the superstition of the day. It is an excellent piece of writing that conveys and carries the film upon its broad stiff shoulders throughout.
Daniel Radcliffe pulls a very good performance as the once thought deformed assistant, rescued by Victor from his own personal Hell and James McAvoy struts through the film with impatient glee, the maniacal disposition of the self possessed wonderfully dripping from every pore and his scenes with Andrew Scott as Inspector Turpin as intriguing as any fan of cinema could ask for.
In a film of warm, resolute acting, it feels peculiar though to come out of the cinema feeling slightly cold, aloof from the vision presented on screen and whereas the idea is a good one, it rankles at the soul that some of the carefully laid out mystery employed by the great Mary Shelley should suffer.
Victor Frankenstein is a serious attempt, like the magnificent offering by Kenneth Brannagh, to shed light on a subject that many turn their heads from but ultimately leaves the audience feeling as cold, perhaps even as sterile, as a scientific experiment allowed to warm itself on a Petri dish under a hot July midday sun, a film with ambition but one that doesn’t fully grasp the opportunity.
Ian D. Hall