Victor Frankenstein

Igor gets his due in the awkwardly-titled Victor Frankenstein, a retelling of the Mary Shelley novel that turns its focus away from the classic story and towards the pop culture elements that have become synonymous with the Frankenstein myth over the past eighty years.

In short: it’s all about Igor (played by Daniel Radcliffe), a character not featured in the Shelley novel nor the classic 1931 Universal movie (though that film did feature a hunchbacked assistant, his name was Fritz). Perhaps the most well-known Igor was the one played by Marty Feldman in Mel Brooks’ 1974 parody Young Frankenstein, which this film nods to with some outright comedic moments. 

At this point, we have a big Guy Ritchie-style Sherlock Holmes chase sequence as the good doctor (currently a medical student) busts Igor out of his literal cage at the circus. The action-movie stylistics, from Lucky Number Slevin director Paul McGuigan, are effective and exciting, but a little out of place in what is otherwise a gothic horror film.

The circus jailbreak results in an accidental death, which draws the attention of an Inspector with a religious bent (played by Spectre’s Andrew Scott) who connects the crime to a strange request for animal body parts, while Frankenstein introduces a willing Igor to his life-and-death experiments.

“You know the story,” Igor tells us through voiceover narration at a couple points. But we don’t know this story: all the parts are familiar but the narrative has been jumbled around to fit a modern Hollywood perspective, and gone are the nuances and meaning behind the original work, replaced by whatever screenwriter Max Landis could come up with to drive the plot forward.

But for all of Victor Frankenstein’s storytelling faults, it isn’t a mess on the level of I, Frankenstein or Dracula Untold. It’s a straightforward and effectively told tale, though there’s more theological back-and-forth than a film like this warrants, and a draggy midsection that features an entirely superfluous romantic subplot.

It embraces the more salacious aspects of the work, which includes mad scientist laboratories and beakers filled with colorful liquids bubbling and emitting fumes. There are brains in jars and a heap of monkey meat that Igor and Frankenstein animate in their first experiment, recalling Re-Animator. This movie isn’t violent (it’s a PG-13 affair) but it’s pretty gross, in a good way.

But Victor Frankenstein is also a woefully confused film that implodes during the final ten minutes, when the monster is finally created (after 90 minutes, we finally get to the monster in this Frankenstein movie) and all the thematic stuff from Shelley and the ’31 film is chewed up and spat out in as short amount of time as possible.

The ’31 Frankenstein recognizes the iconic central character as a tragic figure, and ultimately sympathizes with him. In Victor Frankenstein, he’s just a monster.