When you stream Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein on Netflix, one of the film’s most striking choices becomes obvious: Mia Goth portrays two separate characters — the ethereal Baroness Claire Frankenstein, Victor’s mother, and the enigmatic Lady Elizabeth Harlander, who becomes entangled in Victor’s affections.
Del Toro’s casting is hardly incidental. By having Goth inhabit both roles, the film underscores Victor’s arrested emotional development: brilliant and surgical in skill, yet emotionally tethered to a boyish, maternal fixation. That thematic thread recurs in costume, makeup and production design, which all work in concert to mark the distinction between Goth’s two personas.
“The mother’s more abstracted in this world,” costume designer Kate Hawley told Polygon. “She’s not a present mother who cooks you breakfast — she’s much more part of the dream world.”
The film separates the two characters visually in obvious ways. Claire favors a rich, pigeon-blood red — a recurring motif that saturates Victor’s wardrobe and the spaces he inhabits — while Elizabeth’s costumes lean into botanical inspirations, favoring iridescent greens and beetle-like sheens that evoke malachite’s layered patterns.
Hawley layered iridescent textiles and patterns to evoke the natural world for Elizabeth, scaling mineral-like motifs to create dresses that shimmer like the surfaces of beetles and the swirls of malachite. Those choices were deliberate, designed to make each character occupy a distinct visual language.
Image: NetflixThose crimson accents recur: red gloves, red drapery, repeated touches that tether Victor’s emotional world back to his mother. As Hawley puts it, the color references and staging often read like a Freudian echo, looping back to maternal influence.
Del Toro and his collaborators go further than color to differentiate Goth’s performances. Mike Hill, head of prosthetic makeup effects, crafted an extensive forehead-and-nose appliance for Goth when she appears as Claire — a sculpted prosthetic meant to suggest a familial resemblance to Oscar Isaac, who plays Victor.
“I sculpted a whole forehead and nose for her,” Hill said, noting the technical challenge of the piece and how effectively it conceals the double casting for some viewers.
Whether viewers noticed Goth’s dual casting at first glance or discovered it afterward, the film is rich with visual signposts that make Victor’s psychological entanglement with his mother unmistakable — and help illuminate some of the story’s darker impulses.
Frankenstein is streaming on Netflix now.
Source: Polygon
