Frankenstein Theory Is Not Good

Inspired by a recent iO9 article on Mockumentaries I set out to absorb any that tangentially caught my interest. One such movie was "The Frankenstein Theory" on Netflix.

The movie deals with a young man's theory that Mary Shelly's novel is in fact a true account and that his family is in fact the origin of the tale. With a documentary crew following him he sets out to the Arctic Circle to find the monster.

The story of the movie is rather interesting (thus why I set out to watch it) however, the rest of the movie leaves something to be desired. The first problem is the style of the movie. This movie was originally written as a straight horror movie, I can about guarantee it. At some point during the making they decided to turn it into a "Mockumentary". As a result, it succeeds at neither. It's not very good with the cinematography, the attempt at immitating the documentary feel gives everything this poor quality. Not giving characters or the scenery its due. It doesn't work to build a compelling atmosphere. On the other hand, it's a poor imitation of the Documentary feel. It doesn't commit fully to the idea giving angles that are more like a normally movie cinematography, just wobbly and occasionally fuzzy. The shots don't make sense from the documentary perspective. The result is this really poor mangle of styles that just reeks of no one with a coherent vision on the thing.

This extends to the characters too. And this is the problem. These are clearly horror movie characters, not a documentary crew. This in turn detracts from the characters because they do not ring as true. And the characters cause the documentary style to fail because these are clearly horror movie characters and not humans. It's a vicious cycle.

I also want to highlight the music in this too. There are several points when they use these dramatic classical pieces that would absolutely be WONDERFUL... if the movie was shot with a real cinemagraphic eye. It just becomes out of place with the style of the documentary because the pieces are to highlight the DRAMA of the scene. But of course, this isn't supposed to be a drama. It's a documentary. This goes as far as using these cliche horror cues. These wouldn't be as much of a problem if this was setup as just a horror movie, but since they chose the mockumentary route, you're left wondering... so... someone put this "true event" together, edited all this footage together and... put horror movie cues over it? This is exactly what I'm talking about. Commit to the style you are going for, or you end up with a muddled mess.

Either make your movie look like a documentary and have everything contribute to it OR make your horror movie and in turn have everything contribute to that. If you try to do both, you're going to fail at both. "The Frankenstein Theory" is a perfect example of this.