Francis Ford Coppola’s deliriously remarkable Grand Guignol version of Dracula, released in 1992, reminds me of Alice in Chains’s seminal muck-spreader of an album Dirt from the same year. In both cases, my love for the object doesn’t always defray the disquiet I feel about the damage it wrecked on its medium. Fortunately, while Dirt and its ilk turned rock music into a no man’s land of post-grunge for nearly a decade, Dracula merely took a genre that was already in the grave and dressed its corpse in Victorian duds. The success of Coppola’s film clearly gave Hollywood a reason to “class up” the old-school Universal Horror monsters as an Oscar-approved variant of the genre. Buttressed by the simultaneous success of Merchant Ivory British period epics like Howards End, the resulting monster movies ultimately traded in indulgences of the demonic for pretensions of the divine.

Divine, of course, means respectable, which, for a horror film, means death. While Coppola’s Dracula is a truly unhinged, discombobulated work, and Mike Nichols’s Wolf, while less than fully compelling, nonetheless attempts its own spin on the wolfman archetype, Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein benefits and suffers alike from its obvious zeal for the material. While it has the eager-to-please smile of an ‘80s horror film, it also has the buttoned-up, primed-and-polished straightness of a prestige period piece. It treats the material worshipfully, as holy writ to study or a monument to bow down before, and in doing so it ironically exsanguinates its devilish spirit. This is a distressingly, unimaginatively literal work, yet it absolutely lacks the texture of the original work itself. In following the letter, it kills the spirit.

The grunge comparison I opened with isn’t just incidental either. Branagh clearly adores himself as always, and that shows both in front of and behind the camera. Running around as the protagonist, he saunters and flagellates like a rock star lost in 18^th century England. His direction is consummate, but, as per usual, his visual and actorly showboating extend beyond loving into the somewhat grotesquely self-aggrandizing. As he would do decades later with Hercule Poirot, another cherished literary character, he accents the soulful and compassionate tendencies of the figure at the expense of their angular and distorted features or their capacity to reveal wider social tensions. Rather than being pock-marked and then riven by societal tensions they can’t help but embody, they beautifully – banally – peer into them from a moral high ground. Branagh himself stares longingly and broodingly before the camera, but this particular film lacks enough familiarity with death to truly bring itself to life. When Branagh first announces himself, the film pauses for several seconds after “Victor,”  as though the camera has been waiting with one hand in its pants for the title to drop.

Branagh is, as he always is, trying exceptionally hard to convince us that he is an honest to God film director – at one point, we even get a half-rate imitation of the famous Lawrence of Arabia graphic match  – but the effects are more deadening than electrifying. The camera pirouettes and cavorts in semi-comic circles to evoke the giddy high of scientific exploration but has little visual sense for the character’s manic derangement or the lingering tensions of Frankenstein’s ego. Branagh reduces a torrent of societal anxieties and energies to an essentially personal conundrum and an individualized tragedy, producing a dangerously myopic adaptation that fetishizes the hero’s body without much to say about his mind. Themes are there, lingering in the shadows. Even the concept suggests a connection between maestro and scientist and film director that travels all the way back to the roots of cinema itself, often described as a “Frankensteinian” technology with aspirations to assemble shots of dead history into renewed collective life. But Branagh establishes these connections passively, not as a matter of intent but a simple fact of cinematic existence. He simply can’t but indulge himself, and it feels like he’s showing off rather than honing in or letting loose. This marks him as a genuine auteur of a kind. It also reminds us that being an auteur is in no way a marker of being an artist.  

Score: 5/10