The Doctor Will See You (and Probably Stitch You) Now
Larry Fessenden’s Depraved (2019) is the rare Frankenstein retelling that feels both ancient and terrifyingly modern — like Mary Shelley got reincarnated as a Brooklyn filmmaker with a caffeine addiction and a serious case of survivor’s guilt. It’s Frankenstein for the age of antidepressants, LED lighting, and artisanal despair.
Forget lightning storms and gothic castles. Fessenden’s creature is born under the harsh, sterile glow of a Bushwick laboratory, surrounded not by mad science, but by emotional damage, medical ethics violations, and a soundtrack that probably includes lo-fi playlists titled “melancholy and morally conflicted.”
The film is a slow burn, yes, but what it lacks in monster mayhem it makes up for in heart — literally and figuratively. Because Depraved is less about creating life and more about the unbearable weight of having to live it.
The Setup: PTSD and Play-Doh Anatomy
Henry (David Call), our modern-day Victor Frankenstein, isn’t a wild-eyed lunatic shouting about defying God. He’s a haunted war medic who’s seen too much blood, too many dead faces, and too little reason to keep going. His solution to trauma therapy? Reanimate a corpse in his loft. Because clearly, nothing says “healing process” like building a sentient jigsaw puzzle out of cadavers.
Enter Adam (Alex Breaux), the unlucky recipient of this DIY resurrection. He wakes up stitched together like a human Etsy project, confused, mute, and kind of adorable in a freshly-born Frankenstein way. Henry, to his credit, treats him less like a monster and more like a socially awkward roommate. There’s something strangely touching about their early scenes — Adam learning to walk, eat, and identify shapes, while Henry plays the proud (if slightly unhinged) dad.
If The Shape of Water was “woman falls in love with amphibious man,” then Depraved is “man emotionally adopts human corpse and teaches it to use Spotify.”
The Real Monster Is Capitalism (and Maybe Polidori)
Enter Polidori (Joshua Leonard), Henry’s sleazy business partner — a venture capitalist for Frankenstein experiments. He’s the kind of guy who wears designer clothes, name-drops philosophers, and thinks moral boundaries are just suggestions. Polidori didn’t survive war; he survived networking events.
Where Henry is guilt-ridden and idealistic, Polidori is pure ego and profit. He sees Adam as a prototype — the next big thing in “bio-innovation.” You can practically hear him pitching it to Elon Musk: “Imagine a soldier who doesn’t need sleep, doesn’t feel fear, and can be reassembled after each mission! Also, he loves kombucha.”
It’s in this moral tug-of-war — between Henry’s broken empathy and Polidori’s corporate psychopathy — that Depravedfinds its bite. The film becomes less about the monster’s body and more about the monstrous systems that built him.
Adam: The Gentle Corpse Philosopher
Alex Breaux gives a quietly astonishing performance as Adam. His face — half-stitched, half-childlike — tells a whole novel of confusion and pain. Watching him learn to navigate the world is both endearing and devastating. You root for him, even as you know that things won’t end well. (This is a Frankenstein story, after all — there are no happy endings, just better lighting.)
Adam’s growth is tragic because it’s so human. He learns to speak, to feel, to question, and eventually to rage. His childlike curiosity curdles into existential horror once he realizes what he is — a patchwork person built from other people’s deaths, born not out of love, but out of guilt and ambition.
He’s not a monster. He’s a mirror. And like all mirrors, what he reflects is unpleasant: humanity’s endless capacity to create life and immediately ruin it.
Fessenden’s Monsterverse of the Mind
Larry Fessenden has made a career out of low-budget, high-idea horror, and Depraved might be his masterpiece of sad, shambling madness. It’s beautifully shot — moody blues and surgical whites dripping with dread — and the script walks a razor’s edge between empathy and nihilism.
This isn’t horror in the jump-scare sense. It’s horror in the “oh god, this feels too real” sense. The gore is minimal but surgical — blood as punctuation rather than spectacle. The real terror comes from the emotional dissection: the loneliness, the ethical decay, the slow realization that being alive might be the cruelest experiment of all.
Brooklyn itself becomes part of the film’s DNA — a city of glass, noise, and broken dreams, where everyone’s trying to build something out of the wreckage of themselves. You half expect Adam to get a part-time job at a coffee shop just to pay rent on his existential crisis.
The Humor (Because We’re All Dead Inside Anyway)
For all its heavy themes, Depraved has a streak of pitch-black humor running through it. There’s something inherently absurd about Henry’s domestic life with a reanimated corpse. It’s like Frankenstein reimagined as an indie sitcom:
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“This week on My Undead Roommate*: Adam learns about deodorant.”*
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“Next week: Henry explains Tinder, and it goes exactly as badly as you’d expect.”
Even Polidori’s moral bankruptcy is played with a wink — he’s the kind of villain who could quote Nietzsche while checking his crypto portfolio. When he finally meets his fate (and oh, he will), it’s both karmic and deeply satisfying, like watching someone get haunted by their own LinkedIn profile.
The Science of Sadness
What makes Depraved stand out from other Frankenstein adaptations is its insistence on realism — not in the science, but in the psychology. Henry’s motivations aren’t about “playing God.” They’re about grief, guilt, and the human need to control death.
When he looks at Adam, he doesn’t see a monster — he sees redemption. A chance to fix what war broke. It’s almost sweet, until you realize that every act of creation here comes with a side order of selfishness.
And that’s the horror: not that a man can make life, but that he does it for the same reasons we do everything else — because he’s lonely, scared, and can’t stop tinkering with things he doesn’t understand.
The Ending: Sympathy for the Devil’s Science Project
Without spoiling too much, the ending of Depraved is a brutal but fitting conclusion. There’s no lightning-struck mob, no torches and pitchforks — just quiet tragedy. By the time it’s over, everyone has become both creator and creation, sinner and saint.
Adam’s final moments aren’t about destruction; they’re about realization. He finally understands humanity — and, like most of us, immediately regrets it.
Why It Works (and Why It Hurts)
Fessenden doesn’t just modernize Frankenstein; he weaponizes it. Depraved is a commentary on trauma, military dehumanization, medical ethics, and the cold machinery of late-stage capitalism — all disguised as a monster movie.
But it’s also deeply personal. You can feel Fessenden’s empathy for both his creator and his creature. There’s no villain here, just a chain of bad decisions made by people who mean well and bleed worse.
It’s a film that dares to ask: “What if Frankenstein wasn’t about hubris, but heartbreak?” And then it answers by handing you a stitched-up man and saying, “Hold this. He’s everything you’ve done wrong.”
Final Diagnosis: Beautiful, Bleak, and Weirdly Tender
Depraved is not your typical horror flick. It’s slow, cerebral, and emotionally raw — like a therapy session with scalpels. It’s also darkly funny in that “laugh because otherwise you’ll cry” kind of way.
David Call gives a tragic, understated performance as Henry — a man who’s broken in all the wrong ways — and Alex Breaux’s Adam is nothing short of haunting. Together, they turn the old monster myth into something deeply, disturbingly human.
So if you’re looking for a modern Frankenstein story that swaps thunderclaps for trauma and pitchforks for prescription meds, Depraved is your melancholy masterpiece.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 DIY Resurrections.
Because sometimes, the scariest thing about bringing someone back to life… is realizing you’re the one who’s dead inside.
