Artistic director says monsters are ‘fil rouge’ this year, as Guillermo del Toro unveils his vision of Shelley’s classic
When Guillermo del Toro accepted the Bafta for best director in 2018, he used his speech to pay homage to Mary Shelley, calling her “the most important figure from English legacy”.
“She picked up the plight of Caliban and she gave weight to the burden of Prometheus,” del Toro said. “She gave voice to the voiceless and presence to the invisible, and she showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we need to fabricate monsters of our own.”
Nearly two decades after first announcing his intention to adapt Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Mexican film-maker is finally unveiling his vision of the classic at the Venice film festival. Featuring Oscar Isaac as the obsessive scientist and Jacob Elordi as the monster, the film rekindles Shelley’s meditation on the fragile boundary between humanity and monstrosity. But its premiere comes in a year when Venice appears particularly fixated on monsters of every stripe.
Alberto Barbera, Venice’s artistic director, said the “fil rouge” of this year’s event was monsters, from del Toro’s fantastical creature to the “real monsters” of the last century. “We have films about dictators of the past and present, from Mussolini and Ceaușescu, to Gaddafi and Putin,” he told the Guardian. “There are films about the monstrosity of war in Ukraine and Gaza; the monstrosity of crimes committed by normal people; and the menace of the atomic bomb, which is a real fear.”
