Frankenstein

2025

Guillermo del Toro is one of those directors who makes the same movie again and again. And up until now, I haven’t liked any of them. How strange that the first del Toro movie I have genuinely liked is a two-and-a-half-hour adaptation of a book I hate which proudly wears several major faults on its gory sleeve.

Shall I unpack that? Yes, the novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus starts strong and then become interminable. I really don’t like it. And yes, I like del Toro’s films even less. So, now that he has unveiled his lifelong passion project of bringing that novel to the screen, I had little hope. But for your sakes, dear readers, I watched his Frankenstein…and (like the creature at its center) it is big, flawed, and basically good.

What makes this movie work is del Toro’s utter embrace of the Gothic fairytale nature of the story. (If you don’t know, the book was written by a teenage Mary Shelley on a kind of dare from Lord Byron with the goal of wiling away inhospitable weather and tedious Romatic leisure by channeling the season’s mood. So, low expectations are warranted.) While del Toro has always leveraged the mythic Gothic imagination, his films usually have a grounding in a brutal “real world.” Frankenstein fully enters the fantasy, utilizing extreme and stylized design elements to great effect and leaning into the story’s air of a modern-day Grim(m) tale.

The resulting beauty, ironically, leads to the film’s first fault. It is streaming on Netflix in the cluttered workaday world of your living room on whatever TV you might have, when it is so thoroughly a big screen spectacle. (Yes, it had a very short run in cinemas, but only in “major markets.”) Thankfully, I have a gigantic television and a dedicated room for viewing films. Still, it was like a postcard of the Grand Canyon.

As long as I’ve started enumerating the film’s faults, I should get it over with. The central event of the novel is Victor Frankenstein’s revulsion at the hideous creature he has created, which causes him to abandon it immediately after the “it’s alive” moment invented by film adaptations. (Not only is this famous line Hollywood invention, but so is Igor the hunchbacked lab assistant. Del Toro spares us both.) The director is such a fan of the grotesque, you’d think he would relish designing a monster even its creator can’t look at. However, doing the very thing the book condemns, del Toro knows that the twenty-first-century audience could never learn to love a beast. So he casts hunky heartthrob Jacob Elordi, who spends the first half of the movie lounging around the castle with the form and color of a Michelangelo sculpture.

It’s not that Elordi is a bad bit of casting. His 6’ 5’’ frame makes him look truly disproportionate and inhuman. But why put the boy through eleven (11!) hours of prosthetic makeup every day if it only adds a marble hue to his already-chiseled body? (And should we talk about the unearthly bulge beneath his few wrappings? Let’s not.) The “monster” in this movie is an almost-nude sex symbol. Needless to say, this makes it necessary to invent an entirely different reason for his creator’s dissertion of him. And…sure, it works, but it’s the most essential part of the book del Toro is trying to adapt so faithfully. The monster should be hideous, not sexy.

The next fault is the complete reinvention of the novel’s cast of supporting characters. There, Victor’s father is kind and sympathetic. Here, he is sadistic and cold. Victor’s little brother takes on the Igor role in the film, giving him more to do than die. Elizabeth is changed from a lovesick foundling orphan to a rich science-enthralled modern woman engaged to Victor’s brother. (She’s one of those fictional saint women—a literal former nun—with whom every male falls deeply and unaccountably in love.) And (because Christolph Waltz clearly has to be in this film) an obscenely rich benefactor with shady motives is inserted. (Old man De Lacey is allowed to be himself, thankfully.)

Finally, I am sick to death of CGI animals! We’ll have an entire generation who can’t identify any real fauna. We have CGI rats, CGI deer, CGI wolves, CGI sheep…and the moments when they switch to actual animals are so obvious that the digital versions hit like AI memes. (The horses and dogs seem to be real.)

“But,” to misquote Hopkins, “for all this the movie is not spent.” We get a lot of the arctic framing device which is the novel’s strongest element. The film revels a bit in its gore, but if you know del Toro’s work, you’ll be braced for that. Somehow, Oscar Isaac makes Victor’s florid dialogue sound natural. But, ultimately, the film’s success is one of beauty—the imagery, the cinematography, the score, and the design are sumptuous and elevated, tuned to an aesthetic perfection that even extends to its grotesqueries. At its core, this is the best Frankenstein film out there. If only it were less afraid of making the creature visually monstrous to balance out Frankenstein’s moral monstrosity (which we don’t need to have pointed out in the dialogue, but whatever).

So, wonder of wonders, I really liked watching this. Its aesthetic is only a couple steps behind Tarsem Singh’s The Fall, and it is stunning to see and hear. If only we could see and hear it better…say, on a large cinema screen.