Frankenstein (2025)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Literary purists were going to hate this anyway. Frankenstein, for being one of the most-adapted works of English literature, has never had a film version lauded as faithful to Mary Shelley's Gothic nightmare of a vision. The material itself, sublime and terrible, has always seemed eager to have a life of its own, thus spawning so many takes and versions and interpretations and deconstructions and homages that "Frankenstein" has come to mean, for any generation of readers or viewers, whatever its artists want it to mean. Like the infamous monster it dramatizes, the story's meaning has become an amalgamation of sordid parts, wet connective tissue, and a spark of creative enthusiasm. Take anything from Young Frankenstein to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, with a lot in between (and since), and you'll see what I mean. Hell, pay the cost to watch Danny Boyle's theatrical production with the National Theatre Live company; in two parts, in which the two main actors switch roles as Victor and Creature, the production is gobsmackingly brilliant and deeply moving.

In fact, there's only one adaptation I've ever seen that feels truly faithful to the novel. And no, I don't mean Kenneth Branagh's pseudo-camp, very wet 1994 version, though that will probably now have to retain its deeply misleading and frustrating accolade of being the most faithful feature adaptation. Rather, I refer to the 2004 Hallmark made-for-tv film in two parts, which has its obvious budgetary restrictions but manages nevertheless to faithfully adapt the entire Shelley narrative (!!) with some notably impressive moments (their encounter in the ruined medieval castle is a brilliant scene, cinematographically) and a couple knockout performances, especially from a career-best Luke Goss as the monster. William Hurt's weird accent and flat performance notwithstanding, the production even features a score for days and a few scary images that will knock your socks off.

We all knew Guillermo del Toro would add his signature style to the material, and the trailers reinforced that idea. We all knew this would feature some obnoxious sci-fi imagery, with lots of beakers breaking and animated lighting zapping all over the place; it's annoying, from a purist's perspective, because almost none of the "science" in Shelley's work is like this, yet almost every adaptation uses these trappings to convey something about a very specific idea of (mad) science. And it never makes sense, especially the bizarre stitching patterns used on the creature. If Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs can make a prettier skin suit from girls in a dry well than can an actual surgeon (never mind the century), something is very wrong. Sadly, del Toro's monster follows the same path, offering more stylization than is good for it. The monster so rarely resembles a real dead body that it never feels as scary or gross as it should; its whole point is that it is incarnate abjection, a large living corpse. Do yourself a favor and reread Shelley's description of the monster, and think about what it would really look like. Just don't do it before bedtime!

I say all this because it's important to go into this film with basically no expectations regarding the material. Even a passing knowledge of the novel and its themes will lead you to disappointment. Del Toro has crafted, in his latest film, a travesty of aesthetics. What was so obviously a dream project reveals itself to us as an obsessive, forced mess that butchers its source material on the altar of autership, sacrificing any attempt at philosophical soundness, thematic imagination, and movingly dynamic characters to the false gods of beautiful but hollow imagery, and uninspired and derivative storytelling.

Do we have time for everything? This will be a long one, so gird your loins.

Broken into chapters as it is, I rather expected a more thematic approach. Either a new way of viewing the plot (a la The Last Duel, or Boyle's stage production), or perhaps something linking this more strongly with the Prometheus myth. But no, del Toro merely uses these arbitrary chapter divisions to clarify that the first half of the story is Victor's and the second half is the creature's, as if that wasn't already manifestly apparent in the narrative itself. Worse, despite some ham-fisted dialogue relating Victor to Prometheus -- almost all spoken by Christoph Waltz -- the film ambiguously provides the creature as much if not more imagery associated with the myth (his regeneration, his relationship with fire), so the blending of names and titles becomes functionally meaningless instead of meaningful.

Oscar Isaac plays Victor with his typically excellent craft, though more than once here his voice felt parodic of his own as the title character in X-Men: Apocalypse. Though Isaac has already played the Victor-character before, in the modernized Ex Machina, here del Toro has him set in 1857, several decades after Shelley's original setting, for no apparent reason except to lean farther into the sci-fi trappings of his laboratory. Changing the setting simply to have more reason to insert unnecessary effects sounds pretty artistically bankrupt to me, and it distracts from Isaac's otherwise committed performance. I'd have much preferred to see him going mad while lurking around churchyards and sweating in a lonely, Gothic attic lab. For no clear reason, del Toro has Victor prowling snowy battlefields of what I gather to be the Crimean War; in what world are these corpses of better use to a man looking for ideal, healthy body parts to cobble together a giant man? 

I just don't understand why, in adapting such a clearly and simply constructed story, you'd change so many details that cause you more problems in conveying ideas. Moving things from Regency England to Victorian England only seems justified if the point is to let Victor play with electricity, which isn't even the point of any of this. Worse, it's not even used medically appropriately. By the waking of the creature (and Jacob Elordi gives a fine performance, though his design is too weird and distracting), we quickly learn that he can heal from any wound almost instantly. Heck, in the opening sequence, he's given an animalistic roar and superhuman strength that allows him to singlehandedly move the entire icebound ship loaded with its crew. Imbuing the creature with such superhuman abilities makes him both more monstrous and potentially more heroic, pushing what could and should be a horrifying chamber piece into the realm of Disney-fied superhero flicks.

Del Toro retains the framing device of Victor's final chase through the Arctic and his encounter with sailors trapped there, but the minor theme of the captain's own obsessions is practically absent. In its place, he forces a few action scenes to showcase the supreme might of the creature and its The Terror-like ghostly presence in the frozen wastes. While beautiful, these scenes only confused me more, as they immediately reveal the creature to be immortal and immune to grievous injury. Yet the creature still loiters around, allowing Victor (who looks too healthy to be on death's door) to tell his full account to the captain (Lars Mikkelsen, with nothing to do) before intruding to share his own story. The timing just doesn't add up, even if the views of golden firelight flickering in the icy darkness are lovely on screen.

Victor's story -- told through rather obnoxious voiceover by Isaac -- launches into his childhood home life, quickly bypassed in favor of his days at university, Edinburgh rather than Ingolstadt for unexplained reasons, where he is the subject of an ethics tribunal. He's animating gory, half-corpses and getting them to politely catch and return objects. It's an insane change to the material, not least because it undercuts his entire tragic personality: the whole point is that Victor cannot and does not tell any other soul about his experiments or his eventual creation. His secrecy is wrapped up in his monomania and ego, but del Toro seems thrilled to showcase Victor's efforts to every single character in the film. Impressed by his grotesquerie, Christoph Waltz's original character of Henrich (an arms dealer, for no reason) generously offers to bankroll all of Victor's science, even relocating him to what appears to be an abandoned water treatment tower alongside a reservoir. It's beautiful, sure, but it's also an illogical and gratuitous move in order to force cheap Gothic imagery into the film. 

This reveals a central problem to del Toro's film: in attempting to force Gothicism, he ends up butchering it. How much scarier and more cinematic -- yes, even on a home screen via Netflix -- would Victor's lab have been had it remained true to Shelley's vision? A darkened, locked attic, shrouded in secrecy and night, with much of the body horror seen only by candlelight. Instead, the camera swoops around what might as well be a giant stone lighthouse with a gaping tiled hole running down through its center. Architecturally, it makes no sense at all, and adds a sort of Chekhovian bit of foreshadowing: someone will fall through this inviting hole without guardrails. And indeed, before long, the bizarre and totally extraneous character of Henrich does just that. I hoped we'd retain some of the academic and ethical debate so central to the novel through his character, even if he wasn't one of the iconic professors Victor studied under at university. Alas, he's just there to pay for an expensive and impractical setting.

After the creature is born, Victor is not repulsed or ashamed, but rather takes the creature by hand and walks him around, trying to communicate while teaching him to walk. He even has the creature, who seems shy or pained by sunlight, reach out as if to embrace the yellow rays. There's an impetus of kindness and fatherliness here that actually interested me, because it's so foreign to the material and character. Yet instead of building on this dynamic, del Toro has Victor promptly take the creature to a dungeon -- again, what exactly is this architecture?! -- and chains him up before walking away for the night. For some time after, Victor attempts to teach the creature various things by day before chaining him up again, though the creature only seems able to repeat the name "Victor." 

Until, that is, Victor's family arrives. I don't even know where to start with this. First, his younger brother William (the favorite of their father, played by Charles Dance, in a delicious casting choice for the bit part) is significantly older than he is in the book (so is Victor, to be fair), which changes their dynamic drastically. Worse, Elizabeth is in this version Henrich's niece and William's betrothed. Victor repeatedly makes advances on her, which she rejects; yet upon visiting the tower, Elizabeth immediately wanders into the dungeon and meets the creature, making physical contact without much ado, after which the creature is smitten with her. It's obvious, too, that she's smitten with the creature.

What the fuck, del Toro? I'm all for fresh interpretations of classic stories that aren't bound to purity. Look at Lisa Frankenstein. Look at James Whale's original film. Heck, look at Poor Things. These take a nugget or two and run with it into new and exciting directions. But to pass off your adaptation with integrity while bastardizing the material to suit your own oeuvre feels like the work of an amateur, not an auteur. I'm fine with a dark romance teased out of an ambiguous story: Robert Eggers just did that with his Nosferatu. Del Toro himself has done this! The Shape of Water takes our beloved Gillman from Creature from the Black Lagoon and moves him into a different setting with different themes attached, yet his story is still one of being a missing link and deciding to love a human woman who connects with him. If that's the story del Toro wanted to tell, why didn't he just write that? Why does he try to pass it off as a reasonable adaptation of Frankenstein? He could have taken the character and written a story around it finding romance, acceptance, and forgiveness, and he could have titled it The Shape of Flesh. 

A few moments do offer cool beats we don't always get in these adaptations. Most center around Elordi's creature, though I still think his design looks less like an animated corpse and more like an alien; in fact, he appears to have been visually inspired by Ridley Scott's Prometheus, which is an intriguing connection in genre intertextuality. Woodland creatures seem quite at ease with the monster, and we see him feeding elk and rats a few times. Elordi's physical performance and emotional conveyance is laudable, though I wish he was given more to do by the screenplay. His few scenes of real action are so drenched in CGI -- and yes, while I was at first excited for the wolf pack attack sequence, it quickly derailed into frantic, nonsensical animation -- that they made me lose respect for his performance. You just can't tell what's real or not, which hinders our ability to relate.

Speaking of which, del Toro takes such pains to equalize "monstrous" traits to both Victor and the creature that neither ends up being very dynamic. Victor has urges to be a kindly father or benevolent god, yet his lecherous attitude toward Elizabeth and cruel, almost blasé treatment of his child make him eminently unlikable. The creature is gentle and natural, yet does not hesitate to crush and eviscerate any potential physical threat. By changing the roster of characters in the story, and their ages, we lose several deaths enacted by the creature that increase our complex understanding of his monstrosity, and Victor's by extension. We don't get children being killed or maids being framed (justice for Justine!), and we lose the sorrow of Victor's best friend. There is almost no reason for us to care about Victor because he cares about no one; there is almost no reason for us to care about Elizabeth (and, frankly, Mia Goth's performance is flatter than a pancake in garish, unsightly costumes) because she has no trait of interest beyond liking bugs (so, she's a lay scientist?) and being unfaithful to her betrothed before being passed from brother to brother to child. 

After a messy final act, the film ends on a note that I took particular umbrage with. Having told their respective stories, Victor suddenly and inexplicably feels close to death, and begs the creature's forgiveness, apologizing for his cruelty and negligence. The creature immediately and tearfully accepts and forgives him, and Victor begs the creature not to perish but to "live." The creature disembarks the ship, pushes it out of the ice, and then tries to embrace the sunlight as Victor taught him. It's disgustingly sentimental and anti-Gothic, and profoundly stupid : what life does Victor think this creature could possibly have? He's greeted by horror in civilization. And without Victor, the creature will now forever be alone. Why would the creature want to live? It's a question Shelley asked and had an answer for: he doesn't! But in del Toro's vision, the creature seems fine with living a hermit's life in the Arctic circle, so he tries to affirm that bizarre choice with sunlight and flourish.

And what makes it all worse is that, however we want to define "monster," del Toro could have gone dark with this film. His Nightmare Alley is still on my list of almost-too-disturbing films due to its nihilism and garish theatricality. Can you imagine, here, an ending of the creature drifting away into the inky ether on an ice floe, perhaps holding a torch, slowly disappearing into the blizzard? A haunting chill of possibility, the kind of bleak frisson of the opening scene of Midsommar or that carriage scene in Nosferatu? For that matter, can you imagine an approach to Frankenstein in the style of The Lighthouse, vis-a-vis Robert Eggers?

I really wanted to love this movie, but it might be the first del Toro film I've actively disliked. Very few choices within it are elements I found engaging, thoughtful, or worthwhile. It's loud and bright and kinetic and pretty much everything I don't want from Frankenstein. Worse, his changes to the source material are unfounded, confusing, and detrimental to the story he himself is telling, causing what is a remarkably coherent literary work into a literary travesty without internal logic. Alexandre Desplat's score was lovely, and provided some nice atmosphere. The cinematography was beautiful, if often distracted; editing is more messy, with lots of redundancy, but it's not awful. David Bradley has a nice couple scenes as a rural blind man who becomes the creature's friend, and those might have been the best part of the film (until the giant wolves descend). But pairing my disappointment in the film with my disappointment in del Toro is a nasty shock that I wasn't prepared to handle as we hurtle into awards season.

Pinocchio (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Easily the most beautiful adaptation of the classic story, this may also be the most original, which is saying something of a work adapted countless times in many languages and times and places. Pinocchio, originally published in 1883 in Italy, is currently conceived as a timeless tale in which a lonely man makes a wooden boy puppet or doll who comes to life and must learn what it means not only to be human but to grow up as one. Most widely popularized in the 1940 animated Disney musical, which was also remade in 2022 (I usually love the Disney live action remakes, but this one was middling at best), the story tends to embrace heavily moralized themes of honesty and integrity and sacrifice. The "point" of the story, apart from his nose, is Pinocchio's quest to become a "real boy."

Finally, an adaptation with less moralizing and more speculating comes to us, courtesy of Netflix, from the dark master of the fey and fantastic Guillermo del Toro. The film, which bears his name in the title due to his visionary approach, is remarkably -- and directly oppositional to Disney's two approaches -- entirely done practically. Del Toro's first stop-motion film is the kind of brilliant project that almost makes you wonder how it wasn't the first stop-motion animated film ever made, or at least something like it. For a story that not only questions reality and constantly crosses the boundaries between life and death, but that is indeed about all the animates and inanimates in between, stop-motion is probably the singularly perfect medium for storytelling. It's the ideal combination of material and form, one that emphasizes del Toro's own involvement like Geppetto's (the lonely old man and creator of the titular character) in that the human touch and eye literally creates every painstakingly realized frame of this film.

Interestingly, this Pinocchio also has its updates, and so while it adapts a lot of themes from the original fable, it also updates it slightly, heightening the stakes and increasing our curiosity as del Toro and his team move us forward a bit to the era of World War II. In this atmosphere, under the fraught shadow of Mussolini in power, Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley from Harry Potter and Game of Thrones) is driven to drunken depression after his son Carlo is killed in their idyllic town by a wayward bomb. A grieving Geppetto eventually carves his puppet replacement in a scene eerily reminiscent of Frankenstein, all narrated by a delightful Sebastian J. Cricket (an excellent Ewan McGregor). It's the kind of scene that we'd expect to see in a traditional Grimm-style fairytale, where wishes and death are much closer than they are in subsequent fantasies.

When a Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton, of course) gifts the puppet with consciousness, we begin to see a familiar del Toro at work. He's not interested in Disney-fied versions of fairies, but rather of older, darker understandings of "monsters" and the otherworldly. The Wood Sprite seems more like a biblical angel than a cultural one; much later in the story, a Sphinx-like beast seems to lord over the realm of Death (also voiced by Swinton), and we're reminded that del Toro is very much interested in these things artistically and philosophically, making these moments stand out in a movie already chock-full of spectacular and memorable material. His story is decidedly not taking any inspiration from Christian or even Western ideas.

Del Toro and co-writer Patrick McHale sprinkle some excellent pithy morals and aphorisms in their dialogue, most of which skirt the familiar morals of the last few decades of children's fare, seemingly advocating for more mature themes. Sebastian at one critical point declares, "I try my best, and that's the best anyone can do," and that's the kind of wise perspective that sets him (and this film) apart. Pinocchio's tale here isn't always between lying and honesty, but in fact between life and death itself, and as he "grows up," he learns that life doesn't exist in those ideal forms -- or any idealization -- but rather in the space between them as we learn through failures and successes. It helps that this Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) looks more puppet-like than many iterations, and his abrasive naivete is on full display rather than sidelined. Children aren't usually perfectly behaved curious little cherubs, and it's refreshing to see that in a film that would otherwise be deemed "for children."

It helps, too, that del Toro himself has long championed, in his film, the monstrous and misunderstood who have been hurt by the "civilized" world. He seems to be quite in love with his odd little puppet, and perhaps that's why he clearly wanted his Pinocchio to look more naturalistic and even tree-like. Anything, he seems to say, but a depiction of a typical little boy or even anything too structured, perhaps to continue his ongoing commentary on the dangers of fascist ideologies. It's telling, I think, that apart from Mussolini himself -- who the film directly mocks -- the other major male characters are wicked, including the villainous Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz) who abuses his monkey Spazzatura (Cate Blanchett) and Pinocchio while on tour as well as a government official named Podesta (Ron Perlman) who strictly disciplines his son Candlewick (Finn Wolfhard). One wonders, too, if the often-repeated setting of the town church and visuals of the crucifix indicate del Toro's critical commentary extends to the Catholic church. I suspect it does.

Ultimately, the film leaves us with a surprisingly soft reminder that death isn't always something to be feared, but rather to be respected. Mortality is a gift, even as it curses us with sorrow and pain during life. Even the dual-cast roles of Geppetto's biological son and created son as well as the Wood Sprite and Death indicate a duality of life across the bridge of death. It's at once sobering and refreshing for this kind of thematic content in an animated straight-to-streaming feature, reminding us all that the most beautiful and lovely things in life are what we make, faults and all, out of hardship and tragedy and horror. And maybe some of the lovely things we make will continue on after we're gone, enriching the lives of those who come after. Who knew Pinocchio could be such a philosophical journey?

Nightmare Alley (2021)

Score: 5 / 5

I'm embarrassed to admit I knew nothing of the William Lindsay Gresham novel on which this movie is based, nor on the 1947 film adaptation. But that perhaps made watching this Nightmare Alley the most darkly pleasurable cinematic experience this year. Despite gauging early on that this was no typical fare from writer/director Guillermo del Toro, whose work always seems to include elements of the supernatural to buttress his real aims of skewering wealth, the pious, nuclear families, and genre conventions, it became clear quickly that this is one of his best. There are no fairies or ghosts in this film, at least not literal ones; Nightmare Alley is his astonishing foray into film noir, a crime thriller dripping with style, hinging on plot, and toying with no small amount of irony.

While the ending initially surprised me, it shouldn't have. Without spoiling things, del Toro here crafts a parable about the cyclical nature of self-destructive behavior. Primarily interested in his antihero protagonist, Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper at his best), del Toro frames the film as a character study. Generally nonverbal, Stan leers his way through each scene with Macbeth's ambition glinting from his hungry eyes. Before he says any words at all, we've already seen him drag a corpse into view before setting a house on fire; fleeing the scene, he materializes in a circus circa 1930. Think AHS: Freak Show with a distinctly Gothic palette. Upon seeing the carnival "geek," a feral man who has been abused and dehumanized by the owner (Willem Dafoe) to sell more tickets, Stan gets the itch to make money with this traveling group.

Del Toro, by this point, has shown us a world rich only in desperation, selfishness, and violence. We're keenly aware that Stan's decisions -- mysterious as his criminal past is -- are entrapping him, and we suspect that he is a little masochistic. It's telling that, in walking through the circus before encountering the geek, the only attraction he enters is a giant devilish facade for a "fun house" themed after the circles of hell. It seems Stan knows he is destined for damnation. What he doesn't know, and what del Toro brilliantly highlights through production design, lighting and colors, and cinematography (the excellent Dan Laustsen), is that he is seeing his own future unfold before his eyes. The circus, much like the as-yet-unknown interiors of Stan's mind, is a downward spiral, one that will repeat and deteriorate until he is hopelessly enmeshed in a web of his own making.

Speaking of spidery predators, let's move on to a few other delightful characters. After learning the arts (and tricks) of mentalism from the circus fortune-tellers, Zeena (Toni Collette) and her partner Pete (David Straithairn) who use a clever code to read and cheat people, Stan desires power over the simple-minded masses. Courting another carny named Molly (Rooney Mara) as his lover and assistant, Stan leaves to make a name for himself as a traveling psychic. When things get a little boring or he's not raking in enough money, he starts offering "spook shows," meaning preying on the bereaved and suggesting ghosts of their loved ones mean to communicate. He was forbidden to do this by Zeena, who knew the emotional pain this can cause, and Molly is deeply uncomfortable with the practice too. But Stan, in Cooper's hands, uses his charm and panache just enough to make us doubt that he's a heartless, avaricious wolf in handsome skin. Could his daddy issues -- flashbacks reveal his boyish need for approval and his earnest hope to succeed at any cost -- be sincere, or did they create a black hole of sociopathy?

Enter Dr. Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a psychologist with no small amount of hatred for those who prey on the weak-minded, just as Stan reaches the height of "making it big" in Buffalo, New York. His high society aspirations -- and his disgusting new moustache -- are challenged publicly by the deep alto and satin-sleek woman of his dreams. From her introductory shot, we are keenly aware that she is a standard femme fatale. As written, she's a panther stalking the man she will destroy; in Blanchett's uncommonly intelligent and elegant style, she's a demon in curls and heels, knowingly disarming in her every movement and turn of phrase. As she lures Stan into her sanctum, she vampirically sucks him dry, romantically, sexually, cognitively; his masochistic tendencies make him feel drunk with power in these moments, but we know it's only a matter of time before the good doctor's fangs are bared. It's a masterful performance and one of the most exciting characters on screen this year.

Laustsen's lighting has the uncanny glow of timelessness, a youthful aura that is deeply unsettling as it de-ages its subjects. I'd kill to see this movie in black and white, if only to better appreciate the noir aspects: deep, opaque shadows, sets that feel more like prisons than offices or houses, shades that frame characters like bars on a cell or cages in a zoo. Then again, the gorgeous colors -- strong especially in gold and green hues, the colors of money -- add immensely to the toxic atmosphere and beguiling nightmarish aesthetic. The circular imagery is inherent too repeatedly, from the giant Ferris wheel over the circus to the funhouse tunnel Stan traverses to reach the geek, from the dark and narrow streets of Buffalo to Dr. Ritter's recording cylinders and even the deep hallways of her office building. Even some transitional editing uses old-fashioned iris out before a scene ends. And then, by its final tragic shot, the film suggests to us that we are not so removed from this waking nightmare as we might have hoped. Del Toro's craftsmanship here is one that will keep you thinking long after the credits have rolled; a nightmare indeed.

Antlers (2021)

Score: 3.5 / 5

What a fascinating movie. It's been over a year and a half since its original release date, but finally Antlers is here. Featuring one of the most surprising team-ups I've yet seen, this movie is the result of collaboration between director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass, Hostiles) and producer Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water). Cooper's films usually take place in rural areas and deal with exceptionally sad people; del Toro's films usually combine reality with fantasy in macabre or grotesque ways. Together, here, they craft a gloomy story set in rural Oregon about the darkest sides of human nature, transporting us to lives lived in isolation and not-having. It's a wickedly beautiful movie to behold, and while its themes aren't as well articulated or even explored as some might like, I've found myself unable to think of much else since viewing it.

Adapted (along with Cooper) by writer Nick Antosca (NBC's Hannibal, Syfy's Channel Zero, and Netflix's Brand New Cherry Flavor) from his own short story, Antlers concerns a homecoming for an outcast and an out-coming of family secrets and trauma. Julia (Keri Russell) has returned, apparently recently, to her gloomy hometown, which clearly has fallen into disrepair after economic setbacks and is now riddled with drugs. Setting herself up as a teacher, she tries to reconnect with her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons), the stoic sheriff who seems keenly aware that his town is dying. Through their furtive dialogue and a few well-placed flashbacks, we gather that Julia had been abused as a child by their father; she now feels guilty for abandoning her brother years ago, and while her return was predicated on their father's death, Paul's own potential trauma remains open for interpretation. A west coast equivalent of the Midwest Rust Belt, the town has its share of other problems, though we will only focus on one in this story.

One of Julia's students, Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), checks all the boxes with which she's all too familiar. The quietest and oddest kid in her class, he's jumpy and skittish; when called on to share a story, he tells a dark and almost inappropriate tale, inspired by his own graphic hand-drawn pictures. Suspecting abuse at home, she takes an active interest in him, stalking Lucas through town and getting him ice cream to get him to open up. She learns his mother recently died and that Lucas and his brother are in their father Frank's custody, which everyone darkly seems to understand as a bad thing. We don't have a clear reason for this, but the filmmakers make it pretty clear that Frank is a drug dealer and user.

In fact, the film centers more on Lucas than on Julia, though Russell carries its dramatic heft. This is most clear in its opening sequence, which introduces us to Lucas and Frank, as Frank tells him to wait in the car as he finishes up work in the mine. The effective production design and cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister (Official Secrets, A Quiet Passion, Mortdecai, In Secret, The Deep Blue Sea, and AMC's The Terror, which bears remarkable similarities with this project) draw our attention sharply to the blue-collar atmosphere that has turned to waste as well as the profound darkness of this story's aesthetic. In their meth-cooking lab, Frank and his associate are attacked by something large and animalistic; a curious and concerned Lucas slowly makes his way inside to find his father before the scene ends. Later, we learn Frank is locked up upstairs in his own house, with Lucas trying to support and feed himself and his brother while caring for their father. As we've seen in del Toro's other works, real-life horror and supernatural darkness often fit uncannily well together, and Cooper's oeuvre has never been so rich with dramatic and thematic potential, in my opinion, than here.

Unfortunately, I don't think most of the themes here are mined to the best level of articulation, either visually or didactically. But this is a horror movie -- a creature feature, at that -- and simply surveying some of these ideas is a daring move. It would be easy to focus on the legend or myth (SPOILER: it's a wendigo), the possession aspect, or even the kills, but the filmmakers are more concerned with the drama between these characters and their pasts. Indeed, once Frank is unveiled as a monstrous beast, the movie reveals its true colors as well, and the second half of the movie lumbers into recognizable beats, scares, and violence. The focus, however, never strays from Julia's concern for Lucas, Paul's concern for Julia, or our concern for this group of children, young and old, fighting for survival against abusive parents and the trauma they inflict.

Antlers is not a feel-good movie. Bleak and shadowy in tone as well as imagery, there is almost no humor to break up the cruelty and pain. A talented supporting cast -- including Rory Cochrane, Amy Madigan, and Graham Greene -- pop in for a few lovely scenes, but they, like the leads, seem to be putting in a lot of work to make their minimal dialogue and presence feel natural and dynamic. It's the kind of thankless project A-listers do to prove their mettle -- in a project underwritten, almost determined to make their jobs challenging -- but goes largely ignored or forgotten by mass audiences. But if you're willing to get on its weighty wavelength, Antlers has boons to offer arthouse horror fans in its folktale storytelling, its attention to generational trauma and grief and addiction, its actors' performances and technical performativity, and its technical proficiency.

The Shape of Water (2017)

Score: 4.5 / 5

What a year for horror. First we got Get Out, and since then at least three major Stephen King adaptations, two space-traveling alien flicks, new Annabelle and Insidious installments, Aronofsky's psychological bloodbath mother!, the severely underrated Happy Death Day, and now this. That's not all of them, of course, but enough to show the broad range and scope of the genre this year and to show that at least three are what some are considering high art. Three. Get Out, mother!, and The Shape of Water each transcend the genre in ways I've certainly not seen recently, if at all, in mainstream movies. Get Out, though people will insist is essentially a comedy, and mother!, which nobody really can label, were perhaps more extreme in their violent disruption of normative culture. But The Shape of Water, for all its beauty, is no less brutal in its explicit horror elements nor in its good old-fashioned monstrosity.

The plot is largely uninteresting. Elisa, a mute custodian (an astounding Sally Hawkins) working at a high-security American laboratory during the Cold War, discovers and befriends a monster (Doug Jones). As they embark on a romantic journey together, they must fight the forces that seek to destroy them, namely the cruel colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon). That's it. The crux of the thing. A sort of typical tale told with a few alterations -- I'll never really be okay with the fish-man sex scenes -- it reads as a dark fantasy, a Gothic monster movie not wholly unlike Whale's Frankenstein or a leering Lon Chaney silent film.

Of course, that's where things get really interesting. After reading an interview with director and writer Guillermo del Toro, I learned his love affair with the 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon served as his impetus for this movie. Of course it was. It's impossible to watch The Shape of Water and not see Gill-man in half the scenes. What's interesting, though, is that del Toro wanted to see what happens when the monster and the damsel consummate their affections. That's the great tragedy of Black Lagoon, isn't it? Miscegenation (and inter-species romance) and female agency, etc., is doomed by the white men with guns, etc., seeking to exploit and control nature, etc.

The Shape of Water, though, is also surprisingly timely. It's a love letter to horror, to be sure, but also to the freak show America that is under assault right now. The movie carries intense environmental overtures. Our heroine and romantic star is a woman who has incredible agency, and is also disabled, rendered mute. Her best friends are another black woman (Octavia Spencer) and a closeted gay man (Richard Jenkins). Together, and with the help of a Soviet spy (Michael Stuhlbarg), they escape the laboratory to set the monster --and themselves, I might add -- free. What here isn't spitting in the face of the Trump administration?

It's also, as ever, an uncommonly beautiful movie. Impressionistic and evocative, del Toro crafts yet another dark fantasy of haunting imagery. His lighting and special effects meld into the real world so seamlessly that we are transported to a magical hyper-reality. We know exactly what's happening, if not always how we should feel about it. Even the opening scene, in which Elisa dreams of her flooded apartment in contented peace, reveals a poetic power in del Toro's fantasy beyond most filmmakers right now. Each shot could be framed and mounted in a gallery. The music is pitch-perfect, both Alexandre Desplat's score and the more familiar period tunes.

Gorgeous and chilling, violent and funny, heartwarming and deeply disturbing, The Shape of Things reminds us that romance is always present in horror, and that horror is always present in romance.

IMDb: The Shape of Water

Crimson Peak (2015)

Score: 4.5 / 5

The first thing you should know about Crimson Peak is that it's not a scary movie. It's a horror picture. More than that, it's a period piece Gothic romance. So if you're going to the movies this Halloween looking for shrieks and giggles, you are going to be severely disappointed. If, however, you are going to be reminded of the potential beauty in haunted house films, to revel in the glory of expert filmmaking, or to lose yourself in a macabre fantasy of passion and evil, you can do no better than Guillermo del Toro's latest vision.

From its shockingly white opening image, this film sets itself apart as an atmospheric venture not unlike this summer's Mad Max: Fury Road. We are presented then, in increasingly vibrant strokes, with an immaculately designed period piece shimmering with intricate details and daring lighting. Not a moment passes by onscreen in which the nightmarish hues don't burn themselves into your eyes, forcing you to watch the horror unfold. Of course, the real spectacle here is the house itself, a masterwork of architecture and special effects, riddled with carvings and tapestries, and oozing sanguineous clay. The house is alive, shifting and swaying, "breathing" and groaning, and in almost every scene the red mud that gave the property its name ekes out from under floorboards and behind brick walls. It's a surprisingly eerie special effect, something I would have expected (less tastefully) from a Burton film.

I could continue to praise the production design, but I think you get the idea. The other aspects of the film are all solid, though nothing particularly noteworthy. It's a very familiar story, with simple and conventional plot devices that ultimately lead to an unsurprising and totally satisfying ending. I might have wished that del Toro could have spiced up the drama or the supernatural elements, but there's a lot to be said for balancing a tried-and-true plot with a daring aesthetic. The dialogue is great, and the plot moves along at a brisk pace with enough evenly-paced thrills to keep things effectively spooky.

Jessica Chastain is far and away the crowning jewel of the film. Her cruel gaze and calculating restraint is disturbing from the outset, and frankly her dresses steal every damn scene. As ravishing as she is haunting, Chastain injects her character with seething malice so delicious I was ready to cheer for her in the film's climax. Tom Hiddleston parries her every move with equally calculating energy, though his burns the sweeter. His dynamic turn (and beauty) makes the film's climax far more satisfying, as he and Chastain wholly give themselves over to their perfect Gothic sensibilities. Mia Wasikowska is less satisfying than the other two, though she does work hard for her starring role. It's hard to watch the mesermizing subtleties of Hiddleston and Chastain, and then want to pay attention to Wasikowska's constantly pained expression as she wanders the evil house. I suppose, given her character's profound misfortune, I shouldn't fault her for that, but it just doesn't make for an interesting character. And her designer didn't help, placing her in a shapeless pale nightgown for most of the film and leaving her long stringy blond hair to fly around her puffy shoulders. Does it work to make our hero appear a floating white cloud? Yes. But the ghosts cut a more imposing figure on screen, which is probably not a good thing.

Speaking of the ghosts, I was a little put off by some of the CGI. I mean, thank heaven the ghosts were as stylized as the rest of the film, but perhaps a bit more variation would have sufficed. Neon-red skeletons floating out of pools of clay are creepy, sure, but only when you see them once or twice. After the sixth time, it's a bit less effective. Rather, let's go back to the first scene, where we see an ebony ghost, desiccated and smoking, palpably haunting the little girl's sleep. Much more enticing for me than a parade of bright phantoms floating in the air and pointing to various parts of the house.

Then again, the jump-scares of the ghosts only last a brief time, and it is not long before the real terror of the film introduces itself. Sure, the horror comes from spousal lies, devious plans, and murderous motives, but the terror is far different than I expected. The ghostly pop-outs are creepy, but cannot hold a candle to the surprising brutality that commands the film from the halfway point on. The physical violence, all captured on the screen, is often so surprising and vicious I had to close my eyes more than once. And the blood that ends up spilled is obviously the darker side of the "Crimson Peak" imagery.

It's "The Fall of the House of Usher" meets The Haunting, with a Tim Burton-level flair and a rock-solid aesthetic vision. Can you beat it? Hell no. Chastain's performance during the climax is easily the most terrifying thing I've seen in months. Del Toro's attention to detail and mastery of the genre is unparalleled. I lost myself to this nightmare, and I would gladly do it again.

IMDb: Crimson Peak