User Reviews

Voilá el twisted, this time just subtly erotic and mind-blowing universe by Costas Zapas; an impressive gothic-photographic and visual design tour de force of this intertextual proposal around the nineteenth-century myth of Frankenstein. From the central canonical plot of Byron and the Shelleys, reviving the dead in the Lord's mansion in Switzerland, Costas Zapas recreates an original plot implying that all the relatives of the legendary alchemist and philosopher Dr. Frankenstein have survived since 1817, and thus , through an unusual and surreptitious (but not so much as to be absolutely unknown) contemporary staging in each new city, the "monsters" as the immortal members of the cast have become accustomed to being seen, have continued that old and atavistic eagerness towards the eternal. Upon arriving in this city - undetermined, it is better to repeat and it is something that I will not stop personally blaming on Zapas - the premiere of the strange work "Frankenstein" arouses curiosity and I suspect media and journalism, since there are no photographs or abundant information about the Theater Company or the artists who will present the play. Based? In Mary Shelley. The reporter will insist on interviewing the cast members and in the course, she will be approached by strange subjects who will gradually force her to redirect her initial search and, at the same time, remember that she herself is Elizabeth Lavenza, the girlfriend of then Dr. Frankenstein who is led at the final dinner before the premiere to remember and relive the events that he has denied for more than two centuries and for which the others, Alphonse Frankenstein, the father of the young Dr., William the younger brother and the other characters in the play - such as Adele or the blind caretaker and her two daughters - who have been part of her life in some way over and over again. I have said it in other places and I repeat, Costas Zapas has plenty of what 90 percent of contemporary directors and writers lack, but his innate avant-garde vein that is evident is inherent, it is lackluster when adapted to the plastic cinematographic, as if he lost himself in continuity, perhaps due to the lack of other voices on his work before filming it or before presenting it, or as if Zapas supposed that the leap to better rethink the scenography would weaken its originality. For example, personally and without being a film critic but except for a movie buff, I consider this work could be staged in a village in a royal canton, say in Saint-Germer-de-Fly or Chartres, or similar ones in Spain or the United Kingdom, where the environment would have more realistically affected the results of the work.