Dear Reader,The countdown to the release of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein started early this year. Since Mary Shelley’s novel is one of my favourites, every pre-release “reveal”—whether an image of Oscar Issac looking manic as the “mad scientist” Victor Frankenstein, of Jacob Elordi covered in layers of putty as the “creature”, or the beautiful poster designed by James Jean—dialled up my excitement. When it finally landed on Netflix on November 7, I was jumping silently in my mind. Yet, when I got to view it at last, my heart sank. The movie does not live up to the hype.Most of the time, it made me feel as if I were watching an opulent Bollywood drama. Characters and emotions are presented in broad strokes—Victor’s father is the cruel patriarch, his mother a whimpering wife who must die at childbirth, Victor the talented Byronic hero with a monumental ego, the creature is all misunderstood goodness—which left me longing for the novel’s far more complex texture. Of course, Shelley’s novel, often described as the first work of science fiction, itself demands a strong suspension of disbelief. But the questions it raises—the dangers of playing god; whether there is a god; whether all creators are benevolent by default; whether reason and science can replace magical beliefs, such as in god; whether human beings, if vested with power, will end up using it to oppress the powerless—are deep and real.It is not that del Toro’s adaptation does not concern itself with these themes. Pivotal to it is the relationship between parents and children, and the meaning of humanness. But the high drama—with overflowing colours, bombast, and lachrymose music—trivialises them, reducing everything to a spectacle. If a good adaptation teases out meanings from the original, taking it beyond itself, then this one flutters within the broad plot pegs and then burns itself out with its own extravagance. There are attempts to create intertextuality—for instance, the frames recreating Hamlet with Yorick’s skull, visual references to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, Caravaggio’s Medusa, Simon Renard de Saint-André’s Vanitas, and more. But they merely complement the gorgeous tableaux, without adding depth.Del Toro makes the creature recite Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, probably to throw light on the effects of vaunting ambition that Victor is guilty of. The creature is also introduced to Paradise Lost in a fleeting scene. These literary references mostly function as props in del Toro’s version. Paradise Lost, however, is central to the novel because Victor, with his desire to usurp god’s role, is akin to Milton’s Satan. Satan connects him also to the novel’s subtitle, “The modern Prometheus”. Victor is called Prometheus in the film in a nod to the book, but the Prometheus-like traits in him—insatiable intellectual hunger, courage to court damnation by attempting to cancel out mortality—are not developed enough in del Toro’s version. Shelley’s Victor assembled the creature not simply to get back at his doctor father (who had belittled him in his childhood), as del Toro would have us believe. He created it because he could, as a brilliant scientist. His talent is directly linked to his fatal flaw—intellectual pride—and it is this which brings him down, rather than a sudden hardening of heart against the creature.One of the most radical aspects of Shelley’s Frankenstein involves its views on parenthood and parental neglect. By creating another human being, Victor Frankenstein takes on the role of a mother (the scene in the book where the creature comes into being is full of references of childbirth and the mess of afterbirth). When Victor rejects the “child”, he forces us to confront the possibility that a mother might not automatically overflow with love at the sight of her newborn baby. She might despise it too, and not just because she is suffering from postpartum depression. She might simply not be able to bring herself to love the creature she has birthed.The equation of motherhood with spontaneous love might, after all, be a gendered way of thinking. We shy away from imagining a mother as capable of spurning her child because it strikes at the very basis of society. In reality, there are no set rules for motherly behaviour. Not loving a child wholeheartedly does not necessarily make a woman monstrous. We tend to stop thinking of a woman as person, with full rights to personhood, once she becomes a mother.Unwanted pregnancies were common in Mary Shelley’s time, in the absence of contraception. Most of them were carried to term because of religious taboos. Mary herself was a teenage mother whose first child was conceived out of wedlock. When she was writing Frankenstein, she had just buried her baby daughter. She had four children in all, of whom only one survived to adulthood. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (the early feminist philosopher) had died soon after giving birth to her.While Mary does not share her thoughts on motherhood anywhere, given what follows the “birthing” in Frankenstein, would it be far-fetched to assume that her views were conflicted? Any adaption of the novel can develop on this nuance by making Victor a woman. Mary Shelley might have found it difficult to imagine a woman scientist as the hero, but we can. At a time when adaptations frequently play around with gender-agnostic or colour-blind casting, Frankenstein throws up a minefield of possibilities. In the short film on the making of Frankenstein (also available on Netflix), del Toro says that the parent-child relationship is what he chiefly wanted to explore. I would say that he has missed an opportunity by sticking to Victor as a “father”. The lead woman in his adaptation is Elizabeth Harlander (Mia Goth), Victor’s love interest, who finds humanity in the creature that others think of as an abomination. Her love for him and her rejection of Victor’s advances once she realises how egoistic he is, make her saintly. Her immaculateness is brought out in the scene where she dies dressed in resplendent white—a virgin brimming with untested love.Frankenstein has been adapted into plays, movies, and series several times. Almost all the cinematic adaptations have highlighted its gothic qualities, downplaying its philosophical dimensions. Del Toro does humanise the monster, but others, notably the Penny Dreadful series and the long-running dramatisation of the novel by National Theatre, UK, have done it with greater effectiveness. Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a fine piece of melodrama, easy on the mind and eye, that will impress the crowd that gathers wisdom from social media. Others can go back to the novel to encounter the shadowy passions of the heart. I will leave you now to spend time with Mary’s monster. See you next week.Till then,Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor, FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS