Director – Paul Dudbridge, Screenplay – Jim Griffin, Story – Paul Dudbridge & Jim Griffin, Producers – Paul Dudbridge, Monika Gergelova, Michael Riley & Malcolm Winter, Photography – Keefa Chan, Music – Samu Csernak, Visual Effects Supervisor – Alan Tabrett, Special Effects Supervisor – Keith Harding, Creature Designed by Paul Hyett, Makeup Effects – Jade Harding, Production Design – Matilda Mascall. Production Company – M&M Film Productions/101 Films International/M2 Media Post Inc/Hanover Pictures.
Cast
Juliet Aubrey (Millicent Browning), Matt Barer (William Browning), Philip Martin Brown (Robert Browning/Creature), Alexandra Afreya (Liza Dobson), Michelle Ryan (Lady Charlotte North), Jonathan Hansler (Dr Brammings), Katie Sheridan (Clara Browning), Sean Earl McPherson (Alfred Dobson), Simon Pengelly (Horace)
Plot
London, 1890. Millicent Browning has obtained the diary of Victor Frankenstein from a century earlier and is engaged in a series of experiments involving the revivification of life. Lady Charlotte North comes, demanding the notebooks. Millicent’s aging, wheelchair-ridden husband Robert takes a turn for the worse. As Millicent tends Robert, he drinks the morphine and kills himself. Millicent takes Robert’s body and applies the techniques from the Frankenstein diary to revive him. She then sets about building him a better body. To this extent, she bribes Brammings, the head of the St. Dowson Asylum, where her son William works, to appropriate various inmates for their body parts. When the body of Alfred Dobson is taken, William’s attention is drawn to this by the nurse Liza, who is Alfred’s daughter. Together they begin to investigate the disappearances of the bodies from the asylum, unaware that the person responsible is his own mother.
Paul Dudbridge is emerging as an interesting new name in British genre films. Dudbridge previously co-directed the SF tv series Horizon (2015-7) and then appeared with the film Fear the Invisible Man (2023), an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man (1897). He has also acted as a producer on the horror film The Curse of Hobbes House (2020).
Dudbridge seems to have an interest in classic horror stories. With Fear the Invisible Man and Frankenstein Legacy, he adapts classic stories but also radically alters them to give them a modern spin often at the service of contemporary political attitudes. In both cases, a woman is now placed at the centre of the story – here she gets to even conduct the Frankenstein experiments herself.
Frankenstein Legacy is another Frankenstein Film of the 2023-4 period, following the critically successful Poor Things (2023) and Lisa Frankenstein (2024), both of which also placed women at the centre of the classic story. While all three films focus on women’s issues, they are very different stories. In Poor Things, the film focuses on the liberation of the female creature; in Lisa Frankenstein, the title character is simply searching for the right boyfriend; while here the Frankenstein experiments are conducted by a middle-aged woman seeking to revive her elderly husband in a younger body.
Philip Martin Brown as The Creature
The other noticeable thing in comparison to these other two efforts is that Frankenstein Legacy is made on a lower budget. Certainly, it does incredible things with a lesser budget, but it lacks the resources to hand that Poor Things in particular had. The biggest name it has to call on in its cast is the hardly international superstar name of Michelle Ryan, once the title character in tv’s short-lived revival of Bionic Woman (2007) and a semi-regular in various British tv parts.
The budget stretches particularly well when it comes to the period settings. The set dressings in the laboratory and the mansion all look perfect. The film is very nicely shot when it comes to the grounds of the estate and the lighting of the laboratory and exteriors, all combining to give the film a much more expansive feel than might otherwise have been achieved.
The main issue with Frankenstein Legacy is its awkwardness as a story. It feels contorted in its retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816) – the credits claim it is based on the Mary Shelley novel, but it should more properly be regarded as a sequel that follows the journey of Frankenstein’s notebooks after they are taken from Captain Walton’s ship in The Arctic, the point where the Frankenstein book ends.
In the film, the basics of the story are transformed into an odd family drama where the mother takes the on the role Frankenstein, the creature is her husband and she steals her supply of bodies from the asylum where her son works unaware of his mother’s experiments. It seems ungainly. Not to mention the idea of the Frankenstein monster being played by a geriatric patriarch who, when we first meet him is doddery and confined to a wheelchair, seems eminently unengaging as any kind of monstrous threat. Michelle Ryan is introduced as an aristocratic women who seeks the diaries but is then revealed as belonging to a Secret Society wanting to destroy them, before being treated as a villain after all. It feels like her character needed far more screen time than she gets in order to make the threat she represents work.
