The first filmed version of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) was the silent short Frankenstein (1910). Since then, more than four hundred versions of Shelley’s sutured-together golem have bestridden both the large and small screen. The most well known remains Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), pre-Code gothic horrors which implanted Boris Karloff’s pitiable Monster in the collective imagination forever after.

It comes as little surprise that Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro should now attempt his own reanimation of Shelley’s novel. Del Toro has long been fascinated by monsters, from the vampiric Jesús Gris in the Frankenstein-adjacent début Cronos (1993), to a humanoid amphibian in The Shape of Water (2017), and the sentient puppet of Pinocchio (2022). As well as evincing his interest in the loathed and spurned Other, del Toro’s fascination with god-like creators crafting living entities from inanimate matter is also, in its way, a reflection of the art of the director.

Which brings us to Frankenstein or, rather, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, for this version, despite its alleged fidelity to its source material, is very much a product of del Toro’s quixotic imagination. It opens, as Shelley’s novel does, in the Arctic, where a seafaring expedition led by Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) has run aground on the ice. When Anderson’s crew recover an ailing man with a prosthetic leg – Victor Frankenstein, played with a plummy accent and foppish hair by a miscast Oscar Isaac who, even when apparently close to death, is never less than beautiful – his abject creation is not far behind.

The divergences between our first sighting of the Creature in Shelley’s novel and del Toro’s film are telling. It is not enough for del Toro to reproduce the distant, haunting glimpse of a towering figure whipping through the mist on a dog sled. Instead, he has his Creature – Australian Jacob Elordi, buried under prosthetics, rags, and a voluminous hood – attack the ship in a manner reminiscent of a Marvel villain. Impervious to bullets, he effortlessly forces his way on deck, leaving the broken and burnt bodies of Anderson’s crew in his wake. This is not, in other words, a subtle film.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein has been trumpeted as the most faithful screen adaptation of Shelley’s novel but, while it retains the book’s nested structure, epistolary elements, and multiple perspectives – the first half of the film is told from Victor’s point of view, the second from the Creature’s – the uneven and tonally inconsistent screenplay strays from its source material in confounding ways. The needless insertion of a syphilitic arms merchant who funds Victor’s experiments, played by a bored-looking Christoph Waltz, is but one example.

But what the film most lacks is Shelley’s interest in scientism and hubris – and, most crucially, her humanity. We are led to believe that Victor’s desire to reanimate the dead is the result of his younger self (Christian Convery) witnessing his dictatorial surgeon father (Charles Dance) fail to save his mother (Mia Goth who, in a distinctly Freudian piece of casting, also plays Victor’s love interest Elizabeth) from dying in childbirth.

Yet here, unlike in the novel, Victor comes across as petulant and dissembling rather than blinded by his hunger for knowledge. When Shelley’s Victor turns against his creation it is because, having been cruelly ejected from human society, the Creature hunts down everyone dear to him. In del Toro’s film, it is because the Creature utters the name of a sympathetic woman Victor barely knows. Thus, the roiling passions of Shelley’s book are reduced to mere plot points.

We are never invited to reflect on the question of Victor’s moral monstrousness. Rather, in an example of what The New Yorker’s Namwali Serpell recently called ‘the new literalism plaguing today’s biggest movies’, characters repeatedly assert the idea as fact. We have no need of costume designer Kate Hawley’s allusive crimson red coats, umbrellas, and gloves when barely a scene goes by without the snap and splosh of bones breaking and blood pouring.

The film looks pretty enough with its wide-angle cinematography (Dan Laustsen), exaggerated period detail, and Tim Burton-esque lite-gothic interiors, but it is Elordi’s turn as the Creature that redeems del Toro’s otherwise misconceived film. Despite the harrowing makeup, he brings a vulnerability and pathos to many of his scenes that transcends what is ultimately an adaptation bereft of heart, a cadaver beyond reinvigoration.

Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen (photo by Macall Polay, courtesy of 20th Century Studios)

There are no monsters in Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, although it shares with Frankenstein both a tyrannical father and a tortured, seemingly misbegotten creation that takes on a complex life of its own.

Based on Warren Zanes’s forensic account of the gestation and recording of Bruce Springsteen’s raw, stripped-back 1982 album Nebraska, Deliver Me from Nowhere begins with a black-and-white glimpse of Springsteen’s working-class upbringing in late 1950s Freehold, New Jersey (the young Springsteen is portrayed by Matthew Anthony Pellicano, his adult self by Jeremy Allen White). His father, Douglas (Stephen Graham), is an abusive alcoholic. In his mother, Adele (Gabby Hoffmann), we sense a spirited woman ground down by her circumstances. From here, the action jumps forward to a characteristically barnstorming Springsteen and the E Street Band performance at the conclusion of 1981’s ‘The River Tour’, a moment when Springsteen found himself on the cusp of global stardom.

Wisely, as with James Mangold’s recent biopic of Bob Dylan – who was one of Springsteen’s heroes and an obvious influence on Nebraska – Cooper’s film narrows its aperture to a single period of its subject’s personal and musical evolution rather than attempting to abbreviate a whole life. Its primary tension lies between two coeval versions of Springsteen – the depressed, soul-searching artist of Nebraska, and the all-American entertainer of its follow up Born in the USA (1984).

Cooper’s film does a fine job of glossing Nebraska’s varied cultural and historical inspirations: the movies Night of the Hunter (1955) and Badlands (1973), synth-punk duo Suicide’s eponymous 1977 début album, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, the life and death of 1950s serial killer Charles Starkweather. It also does justice to the complexities of its lo-fi recording – Springsteen, initially envisaging the tracks as demos, laid them down on a primitive cassette recorder in the bedroom of his rented Colts Neck house – and subsequently torturous mastering and cutting.

If the film occasionally regresses into rock biopic cliches and clumsily expositional scenes – those between Springsteen manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) and his wife Barbara (Grace Gummer) are especially egregious – it is rescued by its poignancy and gritty (the cinematography is by Masanobu Takayanagi). Commendable, too, are the performances, from White’s avoidant, haunted Springsteen to Strong’s nebbish Landau and Graham’s brutalising, though ultimately sympathetic, Douglas. As Springsteen’s fictional love interest Fay, Australian Odessa Young is similarly assured, even if Cooper’s screenplay is unable to develop the character beyond the trope of the long-suffering girlfriend whose primary role is to ‘fix’ the male protagonist.

Despite its inevitable concessions to the biopic formula, what makes Deliver Me from Nowhere feel refreshing is its emphasis not on Springsteen’s ‘genius’ but rather his neuroses. In this light, Nebraska – singularly brilliant album though it is – looks less like the unimpeachably authentic of a master than the cathartic outpourings of a traumatised man struggling to reconcile his past, present, and future.

‘I guess there’s just a meanness in this world,’ Springsteen sang on the album’s title track. While that is so, both Frankenstein and Deliver Me from Nowhere – whatever their deficiencies – prove that redemption of one kind or another is nevertheless possible.

The Adelaide Film Festival is running in cinemas across Adelaide from the 15^th to 26^th of October 2025.