On Frankenstein - spoilers
I watched Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of Frankenstein and when I tell you I loved it. I never skip anything Guillermo del Toro works on, he's one of my favorite film makers and artists, so there might be a touch of bias there... but I do genuinely enjoy his take on Frankenstein and the Creature, the relationships between characters, and just the influence of Mexican culture on this film.
I loved the complexity of the characters; I loved how Victor became something of a carbon copy of his father - creating a child and abandoning it when that didn't meet his expectations - and how he chased the comfort of the relationship he had with his mother throughout the film and how he tried to build connection with Elizabeth only for her to think he's s piece of shit.
The fact that the Creature / Adam is also chasing connection and doesn't know what romantic or maternal love is when he meets Elizabeth - who treats him like a child and offers him the comfort that Victor lost when his mother died - and so their relationship is neither sexual nor maternal, it is simply a seeking of connection. Which sends Victor into even more of a spiral, because the creature / Adam - in his eyes - is less intelligent, less beautiful, less successful than Victor is so why is Elizabeth giving her affection to this failure of an experiment? So, he treats the Creature / Adam poorly in retaliation, something he couldn't do to his brother.
He tells the Creature / Adam that the sun is life and then locks him up in a sewer essentially where he can never see sunlight and then constantly degrades and humiliates him because the Creature / Adam isn't learning as fast as Victor wants.
But the only time we see the Creature / Adam wanting to learn is when he's treated kindly. The first time the Creature / Adam speaks - 'Victor' - is when his father is happy to interact with him. Once Victor's sense of 'oooh a shiny new toy' goes away and he begins to treat the Creature / Adam like his father treated him we see this unwillingness to speak until Elizabeth comes in and treats him kindly. Which also leads to the absolute rage bait of the Creature / Adam going, "Victor!" ... "Elizabeth!" ... which leads to Victor burning the estate.
Then The Creature / Adam escapes and makes a life for himself with a father figure who actually loves him (fuck those damn wolves by the way) and then he dies and the Creature / Adam is alone but it's different now because he knows what it is to be loved which is why he goes back to Victor. He can't be alone anymore because while before his time with the old man he knew loneliness, but it was a distant concept. He watched people be happy and together and love each other from a distance but he'd never experienced it and then when he did and it was taken from him, he felt lonely.
So, he goes to Victor to request a companion, and Victor twists it into this idea that the Creature / Adam wants a sexual partner and, yeah, maybe one day but in that moment his request has nothing to do with sex. The Creature / Adam is just lonely, and he doesn't want to be alone anymore. And then one person who's genuinely kind to him is murdered in front of him because Victor can't cope with the fact that Elizabeth doesn't like him.
Then it just leads to more death and more pain and more loneliness and then in the end when Victor is dying and he realizes how much of a dick he was and he treats his son the way he should have when he was resurrected... oh my god I love this movie.
I know this is all just a really vague ramble but there are so many elements of the film I want to talk about (like how Mia Goth playing Elizabeth AND Victor's mom affects the plot and Victor's view of them as women and what that means for Victor and the Creature / Adam?!?!?!) but I can't decide what to settle on so I'll settle on rambling....
All this to say... should I write a fanfic?