Del Toro delivers his monster, ‘Frankenstein’ at Venice

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro gave birth to another monster on Saturday, his big-budget “Frankenstein” movie, joking that the effort had left him worn out as his creation got its world premiere in Venice.

- 

The last creature he delivered here, the aquatic being in “The Shape of Water”, swam off with the festival’s top prize in 2017 before going on to triumph at the Oscars. This latest version of the Mary Shelley masterpiece is also among the 21 films in competition for the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion.

Del Toro’s film is an elaborate, evocative production the director said he had been dreaming about making since he was a child. In one early rave review, the Hollywood Reporter said the film “transcends horror in an emotionally charged take on Mary Shelley”. “I've been following the creature since I was a kid,” the director told journalists at the Venice Film Festival ahead of the premiere.

“I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively and in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world,” Del Toro said. “And now I'm in postpartum depression.” It was surely no accident that the film got its premiere on what is know as Frankenstein Day—the August 30 birthday of the novel's author, Mary Shelley.