Allegedly he’s the best thing in the movie
‘ Elordi, who has given consistently beautiful, sometimes flinty, ever uncategorizable and resistant-to-trend performances throughout his still-rising career, brings a quiet watchfulness to this Frankenstein’s monster, and he becomes the soul of a movie that may not have had one without him.’
Waltz and Goth are fine, with Goth, who in earlier films possesses a mischievous, bubbly offbeatness similar to ‘70s Shelley Duvall but here just as well demonstrates her ability to shimmy into ethereal, period mode, seemingly falling for Frankenstein’s monster at the drop of a wispy, gossamer veil. We’re a little left on the branches as to how this encounter bloomed into a soul-shaking romance — as Elizabeth reveals, later, that she felt she never belonged to the decorous world of parties and corsets and curls and feathers on the head, a world that the monster could take her away from. Del Toro assumes some knowledge of the text so that we can tie these threads together ourselves, but the two romantic entanglements (Elizabeth and the monster, Elizabeth and Victor) don’t get the fleshing-out and level of depth needed for us to accept them, fait accompli, oozing wounds and all.
Still, Elordi does that lifting, with an alternately melancholic and disarmed take on the monster. A scene in which he offers tenderness to a deer after a fiery escape, only for that animal to be unceremoniously gunned down by a hunter, summarizes the del Toro modus operandi: moments of beauty, brushes against sweetness, abruptly eviscerated by gruesome violence. The comingling of the sublime and the brutal, and often in the same shot, is what makes del Toro’s work so fascinating, so distinctly signature-stamped that you would recognize them from space. Or the top of a Victorian garret, anyway. And at least one of these actors falls from one.
The young Australian actor Elordi has brandished brutality and tenderness before, whether in “Euphoria” as a sexually conflicted, self-loathing jock or Justin Kurzel’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” as a traumatized World War II soldier reeling from an extramarital affair. Elordi has the risk-willingness of Marlon Brando, but the softness and vulnerability of pre-accident Montgomery Clift. So there’s no surprise that he nails it once again as this disconcerted monster, a creation and victim of humanity’s hubris. The performance feels something close to otherworldly, an unsure alien dropped from nowhere, but with a movement coach on the back-end for extra litheness, limberness, and tentative undulation. You have to recognize the alchemy between director and performer going on here, as the successes of either in “Frankenstein” would not happen without the other.“