REVIEW: ‘Frankenstein’ is exactly the vibrant, empathetic adaptation you’d expect from Guillermo del Toro
Oscar Isaac as the titular mad scientist in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel.
Some filmmakers get accused of sticking too close to their unique style. Whether it’s Wes Anderson or Michael Bay, sometimes you wish a director would break out of the mould they’ve formed for themselves over the course of their filmography. Try something new, challenge yourself! No one wants to see an artist fall back into accidental self-parody.
So the news that Guillermo del Toro would be directing an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came as no surprise; not only are the Gothic and supernatural themes of the novel a natural fit for Del Toro, but misunderstood monsters have already featured prominently in several of his works to date. What are Hellboy or The Shape of Water’s amphibian man if not trial runs for the creature in Frankenstein? On top of that, Del Toro has repeatedly noted his personal interest in the story, dating back to 2007. He’s spent multiple decades working up the courage to tackle the project, perhaps knowing on a certain level (and fearing) that if there were any working filmmakers who should produce another Frankenstein, it would be him.
Now Del Toro’s version is finally here, in time for a Halloween release, and it’s impossible to shake the feeling when watching it that it’s exactly the way you’d expect a Del Toro Frankenstein to look and feel like. Some viewers may yawn and find that boring, but this is a rare case where I’m on board with a filmmaker working in a well-worn groove, pouring his distinctive style into a particular adaptation. Del Toro’s version feels so complete and visually rich that it may become the modern touchstone for the classic characters, much in the way Bram Stoker’s Dracula did in 1992.
That’s an impressive feat when you consider that by one count, Shelley’s monster has appeared in 419 feature films to date. How could the newest one leapfrog so many others? One of the keys is how Del Toro breaks up the story: he spends nearly half the movie getting us to the successful experiment by Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), reminding us that it is simultaneously Victor’s greatest triumph but also the beginning of his downfall. Then the storytelling (literally) shifts to the monster’s perspective, which doesn’t refute any of Victor’s claims but simply builds on them, explaining how cruel Victor had become in his pursuit of power. The movie may be called Frankenstein, but it is split equally between two characters, creator and creation.
Mia Goth as Elizabeth, the fiancée of Victor’s brother William.
Del Toro’s visual flourishes are everywhere you look. Victor’s lab is in a beautifully wrecked tower perched on a cliff, complete with a gigantic vertical tunnel running through it and huge, glowing green batteries mounted inside. Victor sees visions of a blood-red angel with a frighteningly peaceful expression, and red objects are scattered throughout the costumes and sets (Del Toro is a consistent adherent to colour theory). Rooms are stuffed with mysterious paraphernalia, and proto-monsters are brought to life as twisted, brutalized puppets. The movie was made via Del Toro’s overall deal with Netflix, and it’s clear that while the streaming platform has been keen to cut costs in recent years, they still have the confidence to fund certain filmmakers’ dreams.
As Victor, Isaac is a captivating iconoclast. Costuming helps: much can be made of how Isaac swans around the film in provocatively loose clothing with unkempt hair and red leather gloves (there’s the colour theory again). He’s a Byronic figure, befitting a story that Shelley wrote in Lord Byron’s company. It’s as if the act of pursuing godlike power is akin to rolling out of bed after a long night with a lover. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast (except the big guy) is comparatively buttoned up: Christoph Waltz as Victor’s arms-dealer patron, Mia Goth as his soon-to-be sister-in-law, and Felix Kammerer as his brother. Just from a glance, it’s not hard to detect the constant tension between Victor’s pursuit of knowledge and the conservative, hierarchical society that tries to rein him in.
Jacob Elordi rounds out the main cast as the creature. Despite going for a raspy vocal performance and amping up the physical abilities of the character, Elordi succeeds at finding the intelligence and desire for companionship that Shelley’s novel pointed toward. There’s an extended segment where the creature befriends an old man (David Bradley) in a remote mountain cabin, from whom the creature learns all the things that Victor was too impatient and dismissive to convey. But it’s not long before the creature is discovered, and that sets up the final chase towards the Arctic that becomes the framing narrative of the film.
Jacob Elordi as the creature, cobbled together from the corpses of soldiers in a European war.
As the story rushes to its conclusion, there is a sense that Del Toro is cramming extra material into too short of a runtime. Victor’s hunt for the creature feels slightly truncated, and it would have been interesting to see the creature shadowing him in more locations over a longer period of time. Similarly, the subtext of Victor’s crime of playing god is rendered into some slightly overwrought dialogue in one scene. Perhaps pushing the length towards three hours, or splitting the movie into two parts (as was the hope at one point) was too much for the bean counters at Netflix.
Is there still unexplored ground in the Frankenstein story, over two centuries later? I would hope that the constant drumbeat of adaptations is not merely a result of the relatively copyright-free nature of the characters. Something about Victor’s ambition stirs something in us, whether in the context of scientific discoveries of past generations, or now in the neverending deluge of A.I. Del Toro is also too astute of a cinephile not to notice the comparisons between Victor’s project and the act of filmmaking. Writers and directors can’t control the way their films are received by the audience, and sometimes a movie takes on a life that the creator didn’t intend. Considering how much time Del Toro spent thinking about this movie and working towards it, it’s striking that it turned out so consistent and visually arresting. Please, oh cold, unfeeling movie industry: let him bring more dreams to life!
Frankenstein gets four stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
The obvious double-feature pairing with this movie is Poor Things; if that movie didn’t already exist, Stone would be a great pick for the creature’s Bride.
Did anyone else notice the influence of Get Out on Christoph Waltz’s character’s ultimate goal?
It won’t be long before we get a whole new take on the story, with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! in March 2026.