X-Files Director's Cut Adds Gore, Still Lacks Heart
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- The X-Files: I Want to Believe director's cut, retitled "Vrach Frankenshteyn" (Russian for "Dr Frankenstein"), debuted on Disney+ on Friday and is hidden behind the original 2008 film's "Extras" tab
- Chris Carter has promoted the new version's grisly additions, but the review argues more body horror only amplifies the original film's preposterous plotting and lack of basic dramatic intrigue
- The plot reunites David Duchovny's Mulder and Gillian Anderson's Scully to investigate the disappearance of a female FBI agent, with their lead coming from Billy Connolly's Father Joe — a convicted paedophile priest who claims to receive psychic visions
- The film's villains, Janke Dacyshyn and Franz Tomczeszyn, are barely developed despite a premise where Dacyshyn kidnaps women so that surgeons can attach his dying husband's head to their bodies
- Carter's script mirrors Mary Shelley's Frankenstein but, unlike Shelley, gives its creature no inner life, leaving the gothic horror feeling hollow
- The director's cut can restore more explicit shots of severed limbs and bloody operating tables, but it cannot fix the 18-year-old film's core problem: it was never uninterested in gore, just uninterested in who its monsters actually were
Why it matters: The critique lands on a specific storytelling failure the source attests to: Carter's film has the raw materials of gothic horror — a Frankenstein transplant plot, a paedophile psychic, a husband willing to butcher innocents for love — but scripts its villains with barely enough dialogue to establish a personality, so the director's cut's added gore is stitching flesh onto a skeleton the writer never built.
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