Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro
Starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, and Christoph Waltz
Distributed by Netflix
Running time: 150 minutes
Rated R for violence, gore, and brief nudity
Author’s note: This review contains minor spoilers.
Few (if any) novels have been adapted and retold more than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. By 2025, almost no take on the story is both new and broadly faithful to the original, which left writer and director Guillermo del Toro with essentially one option: Tell the same story again but better. At this, he succeeds wonderfully; his adaptation is one of the best to date.
The film is an almost beat-for-beat retelling of the original novel. The first shots lean hard into del Toro’s strongest skill as a director: visual immersion. We see windburned men toiling in heavy snow, thick ice crystals having taken root in their coarse beards. Their clothes are heavy and simple but filthy, and their movements are sluggish; we can almost feel their exhaustion. Whereas many of del Toro’s films commit unflinchingly to a sort of bizarre yet oddly believable dark fantasy aesthetic, Frankenstein grounds itself firmly in 19th-century Gothic realism such that the fantastical elements accentuate rather than dominate. (This carefully tuned contrast is especially evident and effective during the laboratory scenes later in the film.)
A salty sea captain orders his disgruntled crew to keep chipping away at the thick ice that has ensnared their ship. The men, beginning to lose morale, beg the captain to reassure them that he will abort the mission and give the order to sail home once the ship is freed. He refuses, insisting that they will reach the North Pole as originally planned or die trying. The sailors, clearly angry and disheartened at this news, obediently continue hacking away at the ice—for now.
After night falls, the captain spots a fire in the distance and orders a handful of his men to investigate. They find a man with a prosthetic leg, unconscious and badly wounded. Shortly after they bring him aboard their ship, another man—or rather, something that seems to be a man—appears on the horizon. It’s freakishly tall and wrapped in a tattered cloak, and it moves oddly, with a jerky, unnatural gait. As it advances on the ship, several of the men panic and open fire—but the creature shrugs off the gunshots and responds with animalistic lethality, killing nearly a dozen sailors with its bare hands. Over the din of battle, it roars, “Bring him to me!”
The injured man aboard the ship is, of course, Victor Frankenstein, the creature’s creator. As the sailors drive the monster away temporarily, Victor tells the captain, “It wants me, and only me. I would have no more of your men suffer for my sins. When the creature returns—and it will—put me out there on the ice and let it take me.”[1] The captain demands an explanation, and Victor begins to recount the long and sordid tale. From here, most of the remainder of the film is told in flashbacks.
Because Frankenstein is such a well-known and frequently adapted story, del Toro had his work cut out for him. With little room to innovate in terms of plot, the film instead elevates itself above most prior adaptations through heartfelt writing, excellent acting, and a unique visual identity that is simultaneously vivid and haunting. Although the plot follows that of the novel almost exactly, del Toro changes the ending in one significant respect (which I won’t spoil here). Frankenstein is a legendary novel that has earned its place in the canon of Romantic literature many times over, but it has at least one major flaw: its pessimistic (and arguably fatalistic) ending. Del Toro’s ending successfully reframes the story such that the theme is changed entirely—and thereby improved substantially. (I highly respect Shelley’s novel and don’t make this claim lightly.)
Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi both deliver versatile and moving performances as Victor and the creature, respectively, and together, they comprise a duo more fascinating and sympathetic than any I’ve seen on the big screen in recent memory. Whereas many adaptations of Frankenstein (and even the original novel, to a large extent) portray Victor as a single-minded caricature of arrogant recklessness, Isaac’s version is more complex and more openly conflicted about his own desires and motives—in other words, he is much more human—and he earns partial redemption by the story’s conclusion. For example, during the film’s first act, Victor becomes infatuated with his brother William’s fiancée, Elizabeth, and he repeatedly seeks to seduce her despite her consistent rejection of his advances; this is clearly an instance of the same self-indulgent narcissism that fueled his original quest to conquer death itself. But later in the film, on the eve of Elizabeth’s wedding to William, Victor visits her to apologize for his past behavior. Distrustful of his motives, she asks for the only wedding gift she is willing to accept from him: “No more of your lies.” Whereas the Victor who first created the creature undoubtedly would have pressed past her objections in an attempt to preserve his image in her eyes, the older, wiser Victor simply grants her request and leaves without a word, showing that—finally—he values her happiness more than her perception of him.
Elordi is arguably the real star of the film, bringing depth and breadth to Victor’s creation rarely seen in other adaptations. The first thing viewers notice about del Toro’s take on the creature’s appearance is that it is much more stripped down and simple—much more human—than almost any prior visual interpretation. This was undoubtedly intentional; because Elordi is not buried under multiple layers of makeup and prosthetics, he is able to use his facial expressions and bodily movements to full effect—and he does. In stark contrast to, say, Boris Karloff’s portrayal in the 1931 film, which is mostly bored or bewildered and occasionally angry, Elordi guides the creature through a full character arc, ranging from confused fear to boyish affection to blind rage to abject heartbreak, all without ever tipping into melodrama. The creature begins its cursed unlife as something unmistakably not human but becomes human over time—arguably even more so than its creator. Indeed, Elordi’s performance is so natural and effective that, by the film’s final act, referring to the creature as “it” no longer feels right; he has, in a sense, earned human pronouns.
A fuller and richer evolution of del Toro’s signature visual style permeates every scene. In contrast to much of his earlier work, such as Pan’s Labyrinth—which is aesthetically fascinating but arguably over the top—del Toro shows mature restraint and more nuanced artistic judgment in Frankenstein. Rather than trying to transform Shelley’s original vision into a full-on dark fantasy epic, as he might have been inclined to do earlier in his career, del Toro invites viewers into a conservative, grounded world that makes exceptional use of lighting and color but permits only occasional interjections of the downright weird. Whereas so many modern movies rely on a nonstop onslaught of action and computer-generated imagery to distract viewers from the absence of any real plot or character development, Frankenstein remembers that the point of a movie is to tell a great story, and it does so through the strength of its writing and acting, leveraging visual grandiosity as a complementary but not overwhelming element.
However, one of the film’s two significant flaws also relates to its visual aesthetic. Several scenes feature animals such as wolves and deer, and for some reason, all of them are computer generated—and not skillfully. The animals look noticeably fake, and they break the viewer’s immersion every time they appear. Live animals or practical effects would have fit the film’s look and tone far better.
The film’s other significant weakness is its length. At two and a half hours, it almost overstays its welcome. Roughly twenty minutes could have been cut with little impact to the progression of the story, provided there had been some narrative rearranging and tightening elsewhere. Even so, the film feels long but not painfully so; it has a lot to say, and it needs time to say it.
Frankenstein’s soundtrack often fades to the back of the viewer’s awareness and is largely forgettable, which is not necessarily a bad thing in this case. It’s possible that this, too, was an intentional choice. If so, it likely was made to minimize distractions and to keep viewers focused on the actors’ performances. The score certainly isn’t bad, but it’s not remarkable, either. The same can be said of the cinematography in general, which is minimalistic and straightforward. Even unobtrusive cinematic flourishes such as pans and tracking shots are used sparingly; the majority of the film’s scenes are shot from simple, fixed camera angles. Again, del Toro smartly trusts the actors themselves to hold viewers’ interest, and the entire cast rewards that trust.
With only two months remaining in 2025 and little in the way of serious competition, Frankenstein most likely will stand as the best major studio release of the year by a wide margin. It adapts the original novel faithfully and changes only one major element—the ending—as an act of respectful reinterpretation rather than with the sort of arrogant dismissal that we see in so many recent remakes of classic stories. Fans of Shelley’s groundbreaking novel simply must see how del Toro, like Victor Frankenstein himself, uses old parts to create something new, wondrous, and occasionally terrifying.
[1] This quote is paraphrased.