Frankenstein (2025)

“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, 2025, opens with thunderous applause as we meet the monster before we meet the man. The Arctic. Snow falling over a ruin of ice, a ship that cannot be moved, and from the very first scene, you feel the familiar visuals of del Toro’s hand, a visionary director whose ability to make the most abhorrent into art. Beauty into decay.

Frankenstein, as you will come to see it, is horror softened by the ache of empathy. He did not simply retell Mary Shelley’s iconic story. He quite literally brought it back to life, undoing over a hundred years of missed translations. This is a film that cracked open the original tale, and showed what it really means to play god, and how to create something in your own image doesn't necessarily mean you can handle what you’ve done.

Oscar Isaac played Victor Frankenstein like a rock star, a man who believes he is beyond others. His mannerisms are less of a mad scientist and more of a man seduced by the illusion of mastery. He’s chilling, beautiful, and has a magnetic and unreadable sense of calm that hides his obsession under the surface of mania. He wants to create life not as a man being led by ambition, but a man whose mother was taken to him far too young, a man who was raised by an abusive man, but in all his pursuit to reanimate, he failed to realize there will be humanity in what he creates, a soul within a monster, and with no ability to raise a child - being blinded by his own childhood rage, we watch his protrayal of over-confident, ego-tisitical doctor be broke down with cracks in his confidence when his experiment exceeds his expectations. He has given life to something that never wanted it, and for the first time, you feel Victor break. He knows he has gone too far.

Jacob Elordi’s creature is stunningly beautiful. He is the beating heart of this adaptation, at first glance a lumbering monster, but then, as you get to know him, you meet the child stitched from suffering. A new soul who knows nothing but fear. Cinematographer Dan Lausten gives him an overbearing and haunting physical presence. Light drapes over his sutures, the camera drifts over his ruined skin in such a way that one moment it looks grotesque, then the next, hauntingly beautiful. Elordi moves in such a way that is like a sculpture coming to life; his transition from a child born into a man's body, to an intelligent, thoughtful man, shows the depths of confusion, terror, and fragile wonder. There are moments where you feel the world through his eyes, where you appreciate such simple wonders like snow, and moments where you feel his rage and understanding of life - to live means to kill, at least then.

Del Toro has always been a hauntingly poetic director. The way he casts colour and luminance over deformity is a skill beyond most horror directors.  The film’s design is staggering: flickering candlelight against iron scaffolds, bruised skies bleeding into snow. A man who refuses to join the world of AI and computer enhancements, his sets are real - tangible, and we know we can reach out and feel the cold-hearted chill of Victor's instruments, touch the scars on Frankenstein himself. The world is real. The textures are stunning. Velvet. Bone. Frost. Blood.

Here lies his most intimate film since Pan’s Labyrinth. We receive Frankenstein not as a scary monster but as the rage that forms from sadness. The terror of seeing your own reflection and

The costuming in this film is stunning. The bright, whimsical looks of Mia Goth's “Elizabeth” were a breath of fresh air, beautiful designs in clothing that we have not fully realized since Bram Stoker's Dracula. However, Mia Goth herself, one of the brightest and most ambitious actresses in our time, felt like an idea half-developed, and no matter how beautifully she was presented, she felt no more than a plot point to move Frankenstein further. She’s ethereal, unknowable, but rather than a woman of flesh and blood, she feels more like a ghost of love rather than a life, and though the chemistry between Elizabeth and Frankenstein ached, it was hard to fully realize the longing between them.

There is very little falter in Frankenstein, but it does contain too much. The film starts robust, fast, it pulls you in, and though the story itself is beautiful, it sags in places with moments of philosophical dialogue leaning towards a sermon, and exposition that may be necessary for those who have never read Mary Shelley’s work, but for those of us who have, tedious in the same way getting Superhero backstories feels.

Elordi owns this film. His voice is raw, uneven, nearly breaking. The performance transcends imitation — his work mirrors the pain of the classic Universal Monsters. He’s not doing Karloff, not echoing De Niro or Lee. He’s something wholly new: a ghost in search of a body, a body in search of love.

And yet, del Toro doesn’t romanticize creation. He exposes it. The act of giving life becomes indistinguishable from violence. The camera frames Victor and the Creature in symmetrical compositions — two halves of the same desecrated whole. When the light strikes their faces, it’s never pure.

In that, Frankenstein (2025) becomes a mirror of its own making: a film born from reverence that interrogates reverence itself. Shelley’s story was always prophetic. It’s always been a warning that our desire to play god would birth not glory but grief. Del Toro makes that prophecy feel newly urgent. In the age of synthetic intelligence, genetic sculpting, and curated identity, Victor’s hubris feels less fantastical than familiar.

But perhaps the film’s most quietly devastating message is not about science, but empathy. That which we create, we owe compassion. We must teach, and teach with proper love in only the way we should treat our children, and that, after all is said and done, it is neglect, not lightning, that creates monsters.

By the time the story circles back to the ice — to the haunting stillness where it began — Victor and the Creature are no longer opposites but reflections. Both have become prisoners of their own design, each chasing the other into oblivion. And as the blue light of dawn spills across the snow, you realize that del Toro’s Frankenstein isn’t a horror film at all. It’s a tragedy about love denied, the ache of it, and ultimately, the need for forgiveness to fully realize yourself and move on, and to understand that death is a gift, but in order to receive that gift completely, we must live.

Verdict: ★★★★½

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) is a fever dream of texture and tenderness — flawed, feverish, unforgettable. Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi give performances for the ages; Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz haunt the margins. A story about creation, compassion, and consequence, resurrected with terrifying beauty.