Oscar and Golden Lion winner Guillermo Del Toro unveiled his long-in-the-works Frankenstein at the Venice Film Festival this evening. Playing to a very enthusiastic crowd, the monster movie was greeted by a 15-minute ovation.
Del Toro has charmed the Lido before, winning the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, with 2017’s The Shape of Water, which ultimately went on to scoop four Oscars, including Best Picture and Director.
Frankenstein, adapted by Del Toro from the 1818 literary classic by Mary Shelley, is playing here in competition; Netflix will release in November.
In the film, Oscar Isaac stars as Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature (Jacob Elordi) to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.
During a press conference here earlier today, Del Toro said of his inspiration for making the movie: “It was a religion for me. Since I was a kid — I was raised very Catholic — I never quite understood the saints. And then when I saw Boris Karloff on the screen, I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like. So I’ve been following the creature since I was a kid, and I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively 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.”
Frankenstein also stars Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Christian Convery, Charles Dance and Christoph Waltz.
Del Toro produced alongside longtime collaborator J. Miles Dale and Scott Stuber.