Frankenstein (2025) Review - The Monster Reborn with a Heart
There is something audacious about revisiting a story that has haunted cinema for a century – the tale of creation, abandonment, and identity at the core of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. With his new film, Guillermo del Toro has done precisely that: invited us back to the laboratory, the storm-tossed Arctic, the dark tower by the sea. But rather than simply remake the monster tale, he remakes it in his own shadow-play, full of passion, blood, myth and haunted beauty.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein opens with the ship trapped in ice, retrieving a wounded Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) from the cold. From there the story unfolds in two parts: the first, Victor’s obsessive creation of his Creature; the second, the Creature’s own story of discovery, betrayal and rage. The structure allows del Toro to dwell in both the making of the monster and the making of the myth. The film is lush, baroque, and painterly – every shadow, stitch, and flash of lightning feels intentional.
Oscar Isaac inhabits Victor with theatrical conviction and physical magnetism. He is brilliant, arrogant, paternal yet pitiable. Del Toro taps into the scientist’s wounded history – loss of his mother, favoritism of his brother – and uses that as the rocket-fuel for his ambition. The laboratory is not merely a place of science; it is a forge of hubris. Isaac plays Victor as both Prometheus and Icarus: he will bring fire, he will fly too close, he will fall.
Opposite him, Jacob Elordi takes on the Creature, and here is where del Toro’s heart beats loudest. Rather than the shambling green monster of prior cinema, this Creature is elegant in its suffering: stitched form, raw wound, eyes that ask “What am I?” He learns. He feels. Elordi’s physical performance gives the being an alien grace and a tragic weight. The movie wants us to pity the monster, to walk in his skin, to question the “monstrous” label ourselves.
Mia Goth as Elizabeth and Charles Dance as Victor’s harsh father round out the emotional terrain. They give the narrative human stakes beyond corpse-stitching and scientific euphoria. It is a story about what it costs to create and what it costs to be created. The performances are strong, subtle when required, operatic when needed.
From the snow-bound ship to the crimson laboratory walls, the production design (Tamara Deverell), the costume work (Kate Hawley) and Del Toro’s penchant for creature-and-corpus spectacle all combine into a film of great visual ambition. At times the camera swoops; at other times it lingers on empty corridors and on the quiet before the scream. The score by Alexandre Desplat elevates the poise; the editing allows pain its room.
Del Toro has always loved monsters – and in his hands, the monster becomes icon, metaphor, soul. But he also makes us look at the body, the flesh, the ruptured form. There is gore, yes – severed limbs, soaked corpses – but each shot is connected to an emotional vein. Because in del Toro’s world, the grotesque is never gratuitous; it is expression.
What sets this Frankenstein apart is the way del Toro meditates on otherness, on the consequences of creation, on the ambivalence of parent-child relationships. The Creature is not simply rejected – he is mis-created, misunderstood, and manipulated. When he kills, it is because he has been denied both love and recognition. And Victor? He is haunted not by the creature alone, but by his own motivations: grief, obsession, rivalry and arrogance.
Del Toro departs from Shelley – he simplifies some of the philosophical layering, chooses emotional clarity over pensive ambiguity. Yet that departure is part of what makes it personal. This is del Toro’s Frankenstein, filigreed with his worldview: the outsider, the monster, the heartbreak of unmet expectation.
The film asks: what is a monster? Who is the real monster – the stitched creature, or the man who abandoned him? And in the end, do we pity the maker, the made, or both? The film does not give easy answers – and that is its strength.
This is a film that dares to be big in a streaming age. With a reported $120 million budget and a limited theatrical window from Netflix, it is a statement piece. For long stretches it is wholly absorbing: when the Creature opens his arms in the Arctic winds, when Victor watches his brother die, when the laboratory collapses in flame – you feel the myth come alive.
In a genre too often content with spectacle, Frankenstein reminds us that horror and monster stories are about humans – about consciousness, abandonment, longing, and identity. Del Toro uses the iconic tale not to recycle thrills, but to excavate sadness. He makes us look again at the monster, and through him, at ourselves.
For fans of Shelley, for lovers of Gothic cinema, and for anyone drawn to films that ask big questions through big frames, this is a must-see in a theatrical space. Because the detail, the sound, and the scale demand a large screen, loud surround, darkness. The fact that Netflix granted the film a theatrical window is to its credit. So yes – go see Frankenstein in a theater if you can. It may not dethrone the 1931 original in the annals of cinema history – but in its own way it may be the most emotionally expansive and visually lavish Frankenstein adaptation we’ve had since then.