By If you know me, then you’ll know I love Guillermo del Toro. If I ever see his name attached to a project, then I know a few things about it. I know the world building will simply be to die for, I know the production design will be one of the best things about the film, and I know that he’ll assemble a supporting cast he can mine for great emotional depth. It was true for Pinocchio, it was true for Nightmare Alley, and now, it’s true for Frankenstein.
Frankenstein is a tricky book to adapt. While there’s now a popular consensus on how the Creature should look and behave, that isn’t true for the original novel. In it, the Creature is a more tragic figure, and the sci-fi imagery mixed with Gothic horror makes it a compelling blend of genres, but a tricky one to execute well. Go too much in one direction, and the other will suffer. Then again, del Toro knows how to make great Gothic horror and emotional sci-fi movies, and Frankenstein is that and then some.
I’ll put it this way: I had reservations about seeing movies like Sinners or Kpop Demon Hunters. I had no reservations about Frankenstein.
Frankenstein
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Release Date: October 17, 2025 (Limited Theatrical), November 7, 2025 (Netflix)
Rating: R
While Frankenstein isn’t a one-to-one adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel, it does hit a lot of the same beats you would expect it to. The events of the film are told primarily via flashback from Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), as we see his frustrations with academia and society as he attempts to find a way to overcome death. This leads to an encounter with his brother’s future father-in-law, Henrich (Christoph Waltz), who promises unlimited funds, so Victor can create a being that can overcome life and death. Victor is ultimately successful, but his creature (Jacob Elordi) fails to meet his expectations, and from there, we see the bitter hatred that develops between the two and the many lives that are lost in the process.
While Oscar Isaac is good as Victor, delivering a constant air of arrogance, Jacob Elordi’s performance as the Creature is simply amazing. As the film progresses through its two and a half hour runtime, we see Elordi’s portrayal of the Creature shift as well. While he starts out as a towering figure that can only say one word, the more he grows to understand the world around him, the more we grow to like him. There’s an innocence to his actions, and he never acts without reason, whether that reason is to seek justice or find companionship. Even though he’s capable of great violence, and Elordi’s towering frame makes him especially menacing, we, like Mia Goth’s Elisabeth, slowly come to see how misunderstood he truly is.
That isn’t immediately evident, though. The film starts in media res with Victor being pulled onto a Danish ship called the Horisont as the Creature lays siege to it. It’s a breathtaking introduction to the film, especially once you realize that the sets were all authentic. That may seem like a banal compliment, but in a day and age where so many directors will opt to use CG because it’s easier, del Toro goes to extra mile to ensure Frankenstein’s sets are all practical and made from scratch. But seeing the Creature initially depicted as a violent and raving monstrosity does help hook the audience into why it hates Victor as much as it does and why Victor is so afraid of it.
Copyright: Netflix
If you’re at all familiar with the original novel, that may leave you disappointed, as the Creature there is never shown to be as strong or as violent as he is here. By del Toro’s own admission, he wanted to make his movie a blend of both the themes of the novel and the entertainment factor of the classic Universal monster movies, therefore, giving his creature the strength to toss people hundreds of feet in the air. By all accounts, I would consider his efforts to make the Creature entertaining a resounding success, because the action is never the focus. It’s used sporadically to accentuate key moments. Moments like Victor’s initial attempt to kill the Creature and the Creature’s time with the blind man (David Bradley) hit as hard as they due solely because of the shockingly gruesome violence on screen that flashes across the screen in those key scenes. This isn’t a nice world, and del Toro makes that abundantly clear.
But the world-building isn’t actually the focus of Frankenstein. It’s there, and marvelously done at that, but it’s the character work that del Toro gave all of his attention to. We get such a fleshed-out picture of both Victor and the Creature that they’re some of the most complex characters he’s ever depicted. In the constant debate of whether the Creature or Victor is the true monster, Frankenstein lays most, if not all, the blame at Victor’s feet. His arrogance, desire to twist the truth to absolve himself, and his degrading mental state make him the true villain of the film. We never really liked him in his version of the story, but once we see the Creature’s perspective, he becomes positively vile.
Which is why the ending is probably the weakest part of the film. It starts well, with a fleeting moment of peace for the Creature that is quickly denied, but once his narration concludes and we pick up from the intro, Frankenstein tries to absolve Victor of his sins and have the two reconcile, which doesn’t feel earned. A part of this stems from the truncation of the middle and end of the novel, which is summarized here in about 20 minutes. It’s not exactly a happy ending for Victor, but it doesn’t feel justified given how much of the film has shown Victor as a person who is unrepentant for his actions and how quickly the film tries to have us empathize with him.
Copyright: Netflix
An easy way to have fixed that problem was for Frankenstein to have not spent as much time establishing its premise. As a story that’s well over 200 years old, it doesn’t need a laborious introduction that goes into the minutiae of Victor’s time at college and efforts to secure corpses/funding for his research. We just need to get to the point where Victor makes the Creature, because that’s when the film comes alive. There is a fair amount to set up, but when it results in a rushed ending, it does take some of the wind out of the climax’s sails, especially when the film effectively begins with its climax.
But these are nitpicks from someone who has read the book. To people who have never read the book, they won’t notice these changes in adaptation. My fiancée has never read the book, and she absolutely adored it. She loved the Gothic vibe, the towering sets, and how emotional the film was. The rushed ending didn’t bother her, and it only bothered me because I knew what wasn’t there. By all accounts, Frankenstein is one of the best versions of the classic story ever put to film. Even if you have issues with some of the changes and its slightly underwhelming ending, that doesn’t deny the fact that it’s immensely entertaining and emotionally gripping.
