Crew
Director/Teleplay – Jed Mercurio, Producer – Hugh Warren, Photography – Wojciech Szepel, Music – John Lunn, Monster Visual Effects – Jellyfish, Special Effects – Bob Hollow Special Effects, Prosthetics – Millennium FX, Production Design – Will Hughes-Jones. Production Company – Impossible Pictures.
Cast
Helen McCrory (Dr Victoria Frankenstein), James Purefoy (Dr Henry Clerval), Neil Pearson (Dr Andrew Waldman), Benedict Wong (Dr Ed Gore), Fraser James (Joe), Lindsay Duncan (Professor Jane Pretorious), Matthew Rault-Smith (William Clerval), Julian Bleach (The Monster), Michael Wildman (DCI Connolly), Ace Bhatti (Dr Dhillon), Cally Hamilton (Little Girl)
Plot
Victoria Frankenstein is working on experimental genetics, hoping to be able to create replacement organs in the laboratory. They are startled to find the process has spontaneously grown a toe. At the same time, Victoria’s son William is in hospital and passes away. Before he does, she takes a sample of William’s blood and then injects it into the genetic mix in the lab. However, a power cut causes the container to melt down and the mix to be lost. Afterwards, Victoria is not so sure that everything was destroyed. A humanoid creature has formed and hides. She finds it and brings it back to the laboratory. There however her ex-husband Henry Clerval, who acts on behalf of government interests, wants to take the creature away to study it for what uses it can be put to. Victoria determines to break through and connect with the part of her son inside the creature.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a classic of horror and science fiction. There has been an entire industry of Frankenstein films ever since the first major screen adaptation with the Boris Karloff starring Frankenstein (1931). (See Frankenstein Film for a full listing of these). Among these, there have been a subset that have attempted to modernise the Frankenstein story with the likes of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), Frankenstein ‘80 (1972), Dr Franken (tv movie, 1981), Frankenstein’s Baby (tv movie, 1990), Mr. Stitch (1995), the Dean Koontz Frankenstein (tv movie, 2004), Frankenstein Reborn (2005), Frankenstein’s Bloody Nightmare (2006), The Frankenstein Syndrome/The Prometheus Project (2010), Closer to God (2014), Frankenstein (2015) and Depraved (2019).
This version of Frankenstein comes from Jed Mercurio. Mercurio has since become a high-profile name in British tv as a result of his creation of the hit British cop show Line of Duty (2012-26). Mercurio has also created other tv series such as The Grimleys (1999-2001), Bodies (2004-6), Strike Back (2010-20), Bodyguard (2018) and Breathtaking (2024), as well as one other genre work with the SF mini-series Invasion: Earth (1998).
Jed Mercurio conducts a series of smart updates to Mary Shelley. Frankenstein science is brought into the arena of genetic engineering where Helen McCrory’s Victoria creates a lifeform from scratch, but this is also a form of resurrection where she injects her own late son’s DNA. With a bit of a handwave, this ends up creating a monster. Mercurio even gives us a scene that roughly parallels the monster’s encounter with the little girl in the 1931 Frankenstein. There are all the usual homages made and counterparts of the characters in Frankenstein – one of the most amusing is where Benedict Wong plays an assistant called Dr Ed Gore ie. E. Gore.
On the other hand, the modernisations take this well away from the traditional Frankenstein story. Now there is another whole element about shadowy corporate?/government? interests in the person of Helen’s smooth ex-husband James Purefoy coming in and trying to commandeer the creature for its weaponry value. It also makes McCrory’s Frankenstein into less a traditional Mad Scientist and explorer of forbidden realms than someone who pushed to start a project and fights to preserve what she had created as others try to take it over and proves the humane voice of reason in trying to communicate with the creature when others are exploring more ruthless possibilities.
The film has an above average cast, including the late Helen McCrory doing solid duty as the good doctor and the incredible handsome James Purefoy as her ex-husband. The creature itself is disappointing early 2000s CGI and has an ungainly hammerhead shark-type head, which detracts from the effect. Nevertheless, the scenes where Helen try to communicate it are compelling. The only thing that majorly brings the film down is a downbeat ending where one character gets killed for no real reason and then we end on a coda of ambiguous meaning.
Trailer here (in Spanish)