4K Review: Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on Arrow Video

A film as misshapen and compelling as its central creature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a beautiful monstrosity in 4K.

Mary Shelley’s FrankensteinDirected by Kenneth Branagh from a script by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont (who has effusively disowned the project), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein failed to find the financial success that Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula had enjoyed two years prior, effectively strangling any potential for a late-20th-century monster movie resurgence. But despite its dubious reputation, the film is a handsomely mounted—if largely unimaginative—production and remains the most novel-accurate adaptation of Shelley’s pioneering sci-fi horror classic to date.

In 1794, the adventurous Captain Walton (Aidan Quinn) leads an expedition to the North Pole. When their ship gets trapped in the ice, Walton and his crew soon encounter the mysterious Victor Frankenstein (Branagh) wandering among the shelves of ice. Sensing in the captain a similarly doomed and adventuresome spirit, Victor shares the story of his life with the men and how, during his time as a student at the University of Ingolstadt, he gave new life to a hulking, patchwork lifeform composed of dead tissue. Repulsed by the Creature (Robert De Niro), Victor left it for dead and attempted to return to his life in Geneva with his beloved Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), but his creation nurtured a plan to destroy all that he held dear and pursue him to the ends of the Earth.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is infamous for De Niro’s casting as the stitched-together monstrosity. Some critics balked at the time that the mounds of prosthetics simply couldn’t soften the actor’s tough-guy persona. From a contemporary perspective, though, De Niro is easily the best part of the film—plumbing the depths of the pitiable character and coming up with a soulfulness that’s so often missing from adaptations of this material. Lady and Darabont’s script smartly includes the Creature’s sojourn at the woodland shack of a lowly farmer and his family that’s the thematic and emotional center of Shelley’s novel, and the way this stretch of the film concludes, along with De Niro’s pitiful sense of yearning and devastated response to it, makes for its most effective and stirring set piece.

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If there’s a performance issue, it’s in Branagh’s characterization of Victor Frankenstein. Branagh, early in his directorial career, riding high after the success of Much Ado About Nothing, can’t help but play Victor as a dreamer and creative who rather naïvely wants to conquer death simply to keep his loved ones together. There’s little sense of the self-aggrandizement or god complex (the state of being what Shelley herself termed a “Modern Prometheus”) that makes the character and his narrative so compelling and tragic.

The film’s pace also tends toward the breakneck, with Roger Pratt’s camera often whirling around the actors in unmotivated circles for scene after queasy scene. Editor Andrew Marcus carves up the action as if with a hatchet and the film trips and stumbles from happening to happening with little sense of tension or narrative build. Costume designer James Acheson’s work is elegant, but it’s a far cry from Eiko Ishioka’s iconic (and unexpectedly Oscar-winning) work for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to which this film is impossible not to compare.

And perhaps Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s biggest issue is that it fails to live up to the expectation set by Coppola’s film, which hewed as close to Bram Stoker’s original vision as this one does to Mary Shelley’s. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though rooted in the text that inspired it, wasn’t weighed down by it. Reverence to the written word is admirable, but it’s the moments when Branagh’s film slows down and tries to offer up something truly new—whether it be a pulsating makeshift womb belching forth electric eels or the actual creation of a monstrous “bride” as only hinted at in the novel—that it actually finds its pulse.

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Image/Sound

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was restored by from the 35mm original negative for this release, with audio sourced from the original stereo tracks and color grading approved by Kenneth Branagh. Though there’s a softness to the opening passages, it isn’t long before the hi-def transfer reveals the stunning clarity, depth, and textural beauty of the film’s images. Grain levels are strong and consistent, and though the transfer underlines the rubbery texture of Robert De Niro’s makeup, it also bolsters one’s appreciation for the craftsmanship of prosthetic artist Mark Coulier and his team. Longtime Branagh collaborator Patrick Doyle’s solid but forgettable score is well-served by the DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround audio, as are the film’s more gruesome moments and electrically charged centerpieces with just enough resonant squelch and zap to puts the viewer right in the center of the action.

Extras

As is typical of Arrow Video, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is bursting at the seams with enlightening extras, including an all-new commentary with film historians Michael Brooke and Johnny Mains, interviews with Patrick Doyle, James Acheson, and make-up designer Daniel Parker. Also of note is an insightful new documentary (Mary Shelley and the Creation of a Monster) and featurette (Dissecting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) that dive deep into the original novel and Branagh’s translation of the material. Another particularly delightful addition is Frankenstein: A Liberal Adaptation from Mrs. Shelley’s Famous Story for Edison Production, the very first adaptation of Shelley’s story, circa 1910, in an excellent 2K restoration from the Library of Congress. The first pressing also includes a booklet with two new essays on the film by Jon Towlson and Amy C. Chambers, the latter of which is particularly interesting and insightful as it contends with the film’s themes of scientific/medical distrust as epitomized by its shockingly timely plot point surrounding vaccine hesitancy.

Overall

A film as misshapen and compelling as its central creature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a beautiful monstrosity on Arrow’s 4K release.

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 Cast: Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter, Ian Holm, John Cleese, Aidan Quinn  Director: Kenneth Branagh  Screenwriter: Steph Lady, Frank Darabont  Distributor: Arrow Video  Release Date: April 12, 2022  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Rocco T. Thompson

Rocco is a freelance writer on film, and an Associate Producer for CreatorVC’s In Search of Darkness series.

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