Frankenstein

Frankenstein, written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, is not just a film, it is a requiem, a mirror held up to two centuries of storytelling and the filmmaker's lifelong communion with monsters. From the very first shot, which shows a desolate expanse of the Arctic, a frozen cathedral of desolation, Guillermo del Toro announces his intentions. This is not horror in the conventional sense of the term. It is grief carved in ice, a memory embroidered in flesh. What Mary Shelley conceived in 1818 as a Gothic meditation on creation, transgression, and isolation is reborn here as an elegy for fathers and sons, for creators and their unfinished creations, for the pain that lingers between cruelty and tenderness. Each image bears the mark of Guillermo del Toro: the ornate melancholy of Crimson Peak, the compassion of The Shape of Water, the mythical grandeur of Pan's Labyrinth. But here, that sensibility has matured into something calmer, almost devotional. The monsters are no longer metaphors. They are people. They are us.

The story begins, as Shelley wrote, in the middle of the blinding emptiness of the Arctic. Captain Anderson, played by Lars Mikkelsen, leads an expedition through the frozen North, where they discover an emaciated and feverish man, Victor Frankenstein, brilliantly played by Oscar Isaac, pursued across the ice by an imposing creature (Jacob Elordi) whose rage burns even in the freezing air. These early scenes are imbued with a hallucinatory calm. The ice groans, the wind speaks, and Victor's confession spreads like blood on the snow. Del Toro divides the narrative into two movements: Victor's descent into obsession and the creature's painful awakening. Each is filmed with a distinct rhythm—the first like a fever, the second like a lament—but both revolve around the same wound. They are the creator and the creation, the father and the orphan, reflections trapped in each other's gaze. Guillermo Del Toro doesn't just tell their story; he lets it unfold like a prayer that has been waiting two centuries to be spoken aloud.

In this story, Victor Frankenstein's ambition is born not of arrogance, but of inheritance. His cruelty is learned, not chosen. As a child, he watches his father (Charles Dance, cold and severe) dissect corpses by candlelight, teaching him anatomy as if love were another experiment. When his mother (played with poignant fragility by Mia Goth, who would later play Elizabeth) dies in childbirth, young Victor's grief turns to obsession. He vows to defeat death, to regain control of the chaos that took her away. Del Toro makes this vow seem less like blasphemy and more like a desperate act, the twisted devotion of a child trying to become the god his father demanded he be. When we meet Victor as an adult, Oscar Isaac portrays him as a man consumed by his genius, his mind raging with equations and guilt. His laboratory is not a place of triumph, but of penance. He creates life not out of wonder, but out of repentance.

The creature's birth, when it occurs, is the opposite of what the audience expects. There is no thunder, no cry of defiance to the heavens. Guillermo Del Toro stages it in silence: drops of water, trembling threads, a breath that gives life. The scene seems almost sacred, like an interrupted baptism. The newborn opens its eyes, confused and trembling, while its creator recoils in horror, unable to face what he has created. In this moment, Guillermo del Toro captures the central paradox of parenthood and art: the terror of seeing one's flaws reflected in what one loves. Abandoned by his creator, the Creature learns what Victor learned before him: that rejection is the first language of men. What follows is not the rampage of a monster, but the education of a soul in solitude. Chained, beaten, and rejected in a world that cannot bear to look at his face, he becomes a mirror of human cruelty. When he later finds temporary refuge with a blind hermit (David Bradley, tender and tragic), the film reaches its quietest and most devastating point. For the first time, someone touches him without fear. Their conversations—about music, light, and forgiveness—evoke the kind of beauty that can only exist in the shadows.

Jacob Elordi's performance here is a true revelation. Beneath the prosthetics and stitched skin, he finds not horror, but grace. His creature moves like a man rediscovering his body, unsure which parts still belong to him. Every gesture is cautious, every breath a question. As time passes and he learns to speak and think, Jacob Elordi's performance becomes almost philosophical, a study in the birth of consciousness. When he confronts Victor again, it is not revenge that motivates him, but a perplexed sadness: why give me life if you can't bear to see me live? This question, more than any act of violence, haunts the film. It is the same question that Shelley asked God, that artists ask their work, that children ask their parents. Del Toro builds his entire film around this question and, by refusing to answer it, makes it all the more powerful.

The visual universe of Frankenstein is one of the richest in Guillermo del Toro's career. Production designer Tamara Deverell constructs a world where decadence and divinity coexist: cathedrals filled with dripping pipes, laboratories that resemble crypts, cemeteries that bloom like gardens in the rain. Dan Laustsen's cinematography paints each image in shades of ash and gold, while Alexandre Desplat's music rises like an organ hymn, its motifs half lullaby, half requiem. The film exudes an almost tactile beauty, as if one could feel the cold of the stone walls or the pulse beneath the stitched skin. Yet grandeur never stifles intimacy. Even in its most grandiose moments—the creature's silhouette against a storm, Victor screaming into the void—the focus remains on the quivering of inner emotions. Del Toro has always been an empathetic filmmaker, but here his compassion seems stripped of all spectacle, distilled to its very essence.

Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi are surrounded by an ensemble that reinforces the human contradictions of the story. Christoph Waltz plays Heinrich Harlander, a financier who sees Victor's experiments not as miracles, but as potential markets. His presence adds a note of cynicism, suggesting that the commodification of life began long before the modern era. Mia Goth, in a dual role as mother and fiancée, ties the themes of creation and loss in the story together into a single thread. Her character, Elizabeth, is not a passive victim, but a moral compass, the only character who glimpses the creature's soul and recognizes its resemblance to Victor's. When tragedy finally strikes her, the film collapses into silence. It is not shock that lingers, but a terrible inevitability: every act of creation, del Toro seems to say, requires sacrifice.

As the story returns to the Arctic, Guillermo del Toro's control becomes almost pictorial. The blue, endless ice reflects the inner desert of both men. Victor, exhausted and delirious, confronts his creation one last time. There is no great battle, no divine judgment, only two beings, equal in their ruin, bound by mutual desire. The creature weeps not out of hatred, but out of gratitude. He now understands that Victor's cruelty was born of fear, the same fear that drives all fathers incapable of loving what they have created. When Victor dies, the Creature carries his body across the ice, cradling him like a child. In this silent tableau lies the film's true resurrection: not that of the flesh, but that of forgiveness. As the ship breaks free from the frozen sea and drifts toward the light, the cycle of punishment and shame finally seems to thaw.

Frankenstein is not without its flaws: its solemnity can test the patience, its pace is deliberately slow, even static, but these choices seem integral to its design. This is not a film that seeks thrills or terror. It is a meditation on what it means to love imperfection, to find divinity in deformity. Guillermo del Toro does not so much adapt Shelley's novel as respond to it, adding his own chapter to the long dialogue between creation and creator. Every element—the performances, the images, the music—serves this conversation. And when the creature finally walks alone toward the white horizon, disappearing into the same silence from whence it came, we are left with the faint and impossible hope that it will not be seen as a monster, but as proof that even that which is broken can be beautiful. Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein is a masterpiece of empathy, a film that breathes, bleeds, and believes, reminding us that the true act of creation is not to give life, but to dare to love it once it is created.

Frankenstein
Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro
Based on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
Produced by Guillermo del Toro, J. Miles Dale, Scott Stuber
Starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Charles Dance, Christoph Waltz, Lauren Collins
Cinematography: Dan Laustsen
Edited by Evan Schiff
Music by Alexandre Desplat
Production companies: Double Dare You, Demilo Films, Bluegrass 7
Distributed by Netflix
Release dates: August 30, 2025 (Venice), October 17, 2025 (United States), November 7, 2025 (France)
Running time: 150 minutes

Seen on October 11, 2025 at the Cinémathèque in Paris

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