‘The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn’ Is a Messy Reminder of Why the Original Film Fell Short

“This is God’s work.”

The X-Files is formative television that quite literally helped shape the modern slate of genre programming. Its creator, Chris Carter, will forever have a blank check for masterminding this epic feat and being responsible for some of the franchise’s greatest and most innovative episodes. That being said, he’s also accountable for some of the franchise’s biggest fumbles. Carter is a storyteller who carries a lot of reverence for horror and science fiction classics, including a passionate fascination with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster. Carter has riffed on the Frankenstein’s Monster mythos multiple times over in his various productions, with The X-Files being no exception. Carter returns to this well in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, which would be much more successful if he hadn’t already tackled it in one of the series’ greatest episodes — the Emmy-winning “The Post-Modern Prometheus.” 

This leaves this feature film-sized story left to explore odds and ends that can’t compare to Carter’s previous takes on the concept. That being said, it’s rather apt that Carter would return to play the role of Dr. Frankenstein to his own creation as he resurrects this cold corpse and attempts to breathe fresh life into it by cobbling together random scraps, with the end product simply resulting in a messy abomination. Mary Shelley’s Monster deserves empathy and compassion, whereas The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn deserves to be misunderstood. It’s a project that, while incrementally better than its predecessor, is still fundamentally flawed and merely reminds the audience of what a disappointing misfire I Want to Believe was the first time around. In Vrach Frankenshteyn, Chris Carter completes his bold monstrosity. Unfortunately, it’s a largely pointless endeavor that will leave fans wanting to raise their pitchforks and torches in protest, rather than praising this reanimated atrocity.

For those who are seeing The X-Files: I Want to Believe for the first time, the film presents a fairly routine “monster-of-the-week” storyline that involves a disgraced former priest whose apparent psychic visions reveal a Russian underground human trafficking and organ harvesting operation that’s run by a mad scientist who is trying to play Dr. Frankenstein. It’s an incredibly pedestrian plot that’s not done any favors by its disjointed storytelling, regressive character dynamics, and a complete lack of motivation on the villain’s part. There’s a shaggy foundation to the original film that, in theory, could have been improved by a proper director’s cut. Unfortunately, doesn’t solve any of these problems and, if anything, even magnifies some of them.