'Frankenstein', Guillermo del Toro on the side of the Creature

It is clear that del Toro is especially attentive to this second figure, so much so that that point of view is the most exciting and interesting one, but the Mexican director nevertheless manages to give balance to both characters, a prodigal father and a lost son trying to understand the meaning of their existence.

One can sense that there is a huge production effort within this film, which has a few shortcomings in some rhetorical and lacquered sequences, but still manages to deliver an engaging overview with some moving moments.

It is certainly nothing new that Frankenstein's Creature presents moments of extraordinary humanity (everything was already originally in the source novel), and del Toro places a great deal of emphasis on this aspect, offering the viewer passages that recall in this sense other previous films of his, including 'The Shape of Water', which won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2017.

A few passages could have been polished, but it remains a successful transposition and a film in which one can once again feel all the passion of its director.

The cast includes Oscar Isaac, Christoph Waltz and Mia Goth: the latter is now one of the most recognisable female faces of horror cinema worldwide, after 'The Well-Being Cure', 'Suspiria' and of course the 'X' trilogy directed by Ti West.

It should be noted that 'Frankenstein', which was presented in competition at the Venice Film Festival, has been in selected cinemas since this week and will then arrive on Netflix from 7 November.

From the competition at the Venice Film Festival comes 'Bugonia', a new film by Yorgos Lanthimos.

At the centre of the plot are two conspiracy-obsessed guys who kidnap the powerful CEO of a large company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.

After the rambling mess of 'Kind of Kindness' (2024), Yorgos Lanthimos returns behind the camera to adapt the Korean film 'Save the Green Planet' (2003) by Jang Joon-hwan, bending it to his own style only from an aesthetic point of view. Apart from a few changes (the character who is kidnapped is a man, for instance), the basis of the original is in fact largely maintained by Will Tracy's screenplay, so that 'Bugonia' can to all intents and purposes be considered a remake of that film from over 20 years earlier.

The more interesting reflections smack of the familiar, and the result is a cunning and calculated, cold and studied product that tries to make people smile with intelligent satire and only ends up irritating them with one of the most cliched plot twists of recent years.

At the end of the credits there is nothing left to think about, except for the cosmic emptiness that this bad film brings with it and that makes us regret, once again, the films that the Greek director had made in his homeland (the very powerful 'Dogtooth' and 'Alps'). What was once a great auteur is now a faddish and commercial brand, but we continue to nurture the hope that this trend may one day be reversed.