Upon publishing his memoir at the ripe old age of 29, Kenneth Branagh had already been hyped as his generation’s Laurence Olivier for several years. Viewed as a prodigal talent who had revived Shakespearean cinema for the ‘90s, Branagh inspired as much ire as he did devotion. For every critic who heralded his classically focused commitment to the Bard’s texts, there were sneers of derision that he was pretentious, a try-hard who had a much higher opinion of himself than any 20-something kid from Northern Ireland had any right to be. This is an especially interesting period of his career in the hindsight of 2022. After several years of making sturdy (and occasionally torturous) IP-driven studio pictures, Branagh is now at the forefront of the Oscar season conversation with his semi-autobiographical drama Belfast.
It’s not hard to see why Belfast has won over the For Your Consideration crowd. It’s a perfectly pleasant portrait of family, the nostalgia of childhood, and its inherent strife, a movie practically brewed in a cauldron to be as amiable as possible. Stylistically, there’s not much that separates Belfast from Branagh’s Marvel or Disney efforts. It’s a far cry from his early days and the more esoteric choices he made before the backlash hit. Indeed, it was his weirdest and most daring film that kickstarted it.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a film that exists almost exclusively because of the success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the lascivious vampiric drama that gave Francis Ford Coppola a much-needed box office hit and helped to revive speculative cinema for the ’90s. The film briefly inspired a kind of prestige legitimacy of the horror genre, leading to “serious” directors taking on alternate visions of classic stories, from Stephen Frears’s dreary reimagining of the Jekyll and Hyde story with Mary Reilly, to Wolf, Mike Nichols’s fascinating interpretation of the wolfman lore as a story of primal masculinity and corporate subterfuge. Branagh’s addition to this fad, produced by Coppola, is the one that comes the closest to capturing the tone and intent of its source material. It’s also, it must be said, sort of a disaster.
Branagh himself plays Dr. Frankenstein as an obsessive egomaniac with the aesthetic of an ‘80s romance novel hero, complete with gratuitous oiled-up abs shots, which is patently ridiculous but also in line with Shelley’s villain. Critics called out the film for feeling like more of a vanity shoot than usual for Branagh, a man used to directing himself as the lead, but at least this performance makes sense in the harried context Branagh created for himself. Shelley’s novel is often deeply contemplative, a philosophical tract on the nature of life and the guilt of the creator. On-screen, it often resembles an action film. The camera simply never stops moving, constantly spiralling around the actors, regardless of whether or not they’re doing anything of narrative importance. While it seems fitting for the feverish intensity of Shelley’s radical ideas, it soon wears thin. It often feels like Branagh doesn’t think there’s enough drama in the pioneering text of science-fiction, so he has to amp up the action.
It is this conflicting approach to the novel that makes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein such a jarring watch. Branagh’s understanding of classical texts can be seen in sparks throughout the film. The zealotry of Frankenstein’s work has never felt as full-throated in other adaptations as it does here. The gaps in the text that Branagh fills in, particularly the more grotesque mechanics of how the creature comes to life (via lots of amniotic fluid), feel perfectly in tune with the book. Yet the overreliance on melodrama, which seems better suited to Dracula’s realm, dilutes the near-elegiac quality of the source material. The music is loud, the camera refuses to stay still, and there’s just so much screaming. The film’s original screenwriter Frank Darabont, who later disavowed it, said, “Shelley’s book is not operatic, it whispers at you a lot.” Branagh’s movie yells, fully convinced that subtext is for cowards.
It only gets messier when Branagh relies on his worst impulses, including starry casting that can veer between unexpected yet appropriate to beyond distracting. Robert De Niro gives one of his most confusing performances as the monster, slathered under make-up yet all too recognizable as the icon that he is. The pathos of the creature struggles to shine past the viewer’s bafflement at seeing Travis Bickle lumber around awkwardly. Helena Bonham Carter fares better as Frankenstein’s love, who faces a terrible fate.
For all of the film’s frantic failures, it remains a fascinating and frequently enjoyable watch. Branagh would make some comparably weird creative decisions after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, such as his sharp-tongued, chest-beating remake of Sleuth, but nothing would match this movie for sheer neck-breaking passion. As misguided as it frequently is, it’s a film with nerve, something that is sorely lacking in Branagh’s recent run of respectably sturdy studio efforts that stridently follow age-old formulas. Imagine the alternate future where Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a success and Branagh took the route of Ken Russell over Ron Howard. 
“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” is streaming on HBO Max and available for digital rental or purchase via the usual platforms. It will be released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on March 29 from Arrow Video.
