Frankenstein is a beautiful gothic take on Mary Shelley’s novel that’s stunning to look at yet also unexpectedly uninspired.
Mild spoilers… even for those who may have read Mary Shelley’s 200+ year old novel.
There’s a risk of letting great artists realise their dream projects, because the final result will almost always fail to meet expectations of the creator and/or audience. Just see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.
For 20 or so years, Frankenstein has been on Guillermo del Toro’s mind as a movie he’d love to make, specifically as a “faithful ‘Miltonian tragedy.’” On paper, it makes perfect sense given his love for Mary Shelley’s novel, and how prevalent gothic romance and “human vs monster” themes are threaded throughout Del Toro’s movies. But upon watching his long-gestating adaptation of Frankenstein finally brought to life (pun intended), I have to ask myself one simple question: why?
Sticking closely to the source material, Frankenstein starts in medias res with Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, great) chasing down his creation in the Arctic and being rescued by the crew of a trapped North Pole expedition. As he is nursed back to health, Victor tells his story to the expedition’s Danish captain and we flash back to the beginning where his obsession with creating life began.
Del Toro makes a choice to make his version of Victor a victim of childhood trauma whose obsession with creating life stems from Oedipal angst over his dead mother (Mia Goth), which circles back around into a strange lust for Elizabeth Lavenza (also Mia Goth), his brother William’s fiancée. It’s the opposite of subtle, but there’s some interesting stuff worth mining there. Or there would’ve been had del Toro followed it through and not had Victor default into the usual mad scientist trope of hubris and ego. All that sheer effort put into introducing this childhood trauma character thread, only to just leave it hanging – it’s madness. At least Isaac is magnetic to watch as a manic Victor Frankenstein, even if the writing for this version of the character is a bit spotty.
Where del Toro better spends all that effort is the movie’s morbidly beautiful aesthetic. Detailed 19th century anatomical drawings are painstakingly recreated, grey corpses posed like statues with the skin peeled back exposing the spinal column and brain, dismembered body parts depicted like lumps of clay ready to be moulded into something even more horrifying, and the stone tower that functions as Victor’s laboratory is a gnarly altar of steampunk-inspired faux-tech. It’s just a damn shame the immaculate production design and painstakingly built sets are sullied somewhat by some shoddy CGI. Del Toro has previously used CGI to brilliant effect in Pacific Rim, so it’s disappointing that a gorgeous-looking movie like this gets saddled with subpar visual slop.
(A/N: At least we know it’s not AI and it never will be.)
But the big choice del Toro makes that works brilliantly is casting Jacob Elordi as the monster. When the story shifts from Victor’s to the monster’s perspective, it becomes essentially a copy and paste from Shelley’s novel. There’s nothing we haven’t really seen before narrative-wise, but Elordi’s performance as a curious creature brought into an unforgiving world is so tender and melancholic that it ranks up there as one of 2025’s best. It’s sad he never receives a name because it feels… wrong calling him ‘the monster’, but ‘Frankenstein’s creation’ also undermines him. Miltonian tragedy indeed.
And the make-up effects? It’s like a misshapen mannequin with drawn-on musculature that’s grotesque to look at, yet there’s a strange sexy quality to it because, well, it’s Jacob Elordi. Amazing stuff.
Equally important as the Elordi casting is del Toro’s choice to have the monster be unable to permanently die. The monster can be ‘killed’ but he’ll always cling to life like a revenant. The addition of immortality gives the movie an extra layer of tragedy. In creating life, Victor inadvertently sentenced his creation to an eternity of loss and loneliness. When we get to Victor and the monster’s final conversation, there’s a deeper level of understanding and catharsis between creator and creation that wouldn’t have been possible had the monster been able to die (as in the novel).
Victor’s rumination over how “the achievement felt unnatural, void of meaning” after giving life to the monster is a pretty apt answer to my earlier question of why this movie needed to exist. For all the stuff I love about Elordi, the production design, and the choices del Toro made to change up the usual Frankenstein movie, I can’t help but feel like he’s done a better job exploring similar themes in Nightmare Alley and Pan’s Labyrinth. Hell, he’s already done a ‘humanity is the monster’ movie with The Shape of Water.
When you’re playing within the confines of something you’ve revered for decades, that reverence becomes a limitation, and Frankenstein ironically feels like nothing more than an iteration of what del Toro’s done before. It’s a pretty damn good iteration that’s clearly made with all the love and passion that Frankenstein’s monster sorely craves (and deserves), but it’s an iteration nevertheless. This certainly is not a Megalopolis, nor is it a masterpiece, it’s just a good movie adaptation of a novel that’s over 200 years old.