Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a film of exquisite surfaces.
Every frame glows with painterly attention: the flicker of candlelight on stitched flesh, a crimson-lacquered angel, a rider frozen mid-gallop in a snowbound tableau. It’s as if Del Toro has built an anatomical model of Frankenstein – every bone polished, every vein visible – but forgotten to breathe full life into it.
Del Toro leans fully into his strengths here: sumptuous costume design, elaborately lit sets, and tableaux that evoke gothic paintings more than kinetic cinema. The director’s affection for the grotesque and the ornate is everywhere, from the glowing brass voltaic batteries of Victor’s lab to the baroque sprawl of his manor, all shimmering with an unreal, dreamlike intensity.
This isn’t the sweaty, kinetic chaos of Kenneth Branagh’s version; it’s closer in spirit to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula – a lavish Gothic phantasmagoria where emotion is filtered through theatrical excess.
Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein as a man of furrowed brilliance and quiet mania. He’s magnetic yet opaque, his arrogance too controlled to inspire much pathos. Jacob Elordi as The Creature gives the film its emotional anchor. His creature is presented not as grotesque monstrosity but as a near-ethereal, even beautiful being, but, save from his first appearance in media res, he lacks the existential weight or danger that one expects — he is more tragic than terrifying.
Mia Goth’s Elizabeth is imbued with melancholic grace, though she’s largely trapped in the film’s visual machinery — more muse than partner in creation. Christoph Waltz brings his usual mischievous twinkle to Victor’s benefactor, Harlander, but the film struggles to find space for him.
Cinematographer Dan Laustsen bathes everything in chiaroscuro light. Scenes of light and shadow are dazzling – for example, the flicker of galvanic arcs, or shafts of moonlight catching stitched flesh – yet very often feel strangely flat. It’s breathtaking, but also oddly inert, a gallery of masterpieces that never quite come alive.
The score, by frequent Del Toro collaborator Alexandre Desplat, wraps the film in melancholy grandeur – all choral whispers, strings that shiver like breath on glass, and organ tones that evoke a cathedral of the damned. It’s gorgeously doom-laden, another layer of artistry in a film already drowning in it.
The blurred boundary between humanity and monstrosity has been central to Del Toro’s filmography, so its strange then that his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, arguably the key thematic text, has so little to say.
Del Toro seems content to gesture at them rather than excavate them. Symbols crowd the frame: the cruciform raising of the creature, the red veil, the recurrent imagery of birth and decay. But it’s never clear whether these images are meant to illuminate or simply adorn? The film teases profundity, then retreats into its own aesthetic reverie. When one character literally tells Victor, “You are the monster,” it lands with the bluntness of underlined subtext.
Frankenstein’s structure — shifting narrative voice from Victor to The Creature in a second chapter — while novelistically sound, feels cinematically disjointed. The second act in particular feels both climactic and anticlimactic, leaving the film with nowhere to go than where is has already gone. The result is less an emotional crescendo than a haunting diminuendo.
Still, Frankenstein is a marvel of craft and atmosphere. It may not shock the heart to life, but it gleams magnificently on the slab.
Frankenstein was screened as part of the 2025 London Film Festival. It receives a limited theatrical release on October 17, 2025, and will be available to stream on Netflix from November 7, 2025.
