FRANKENSTEIN (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Frankenstein, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 17, 2025

There are moments in writer/director Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein that feel as if the filmmaker has been building toward this film for his entire career. The man has a fascination with monsters, which is the obvious entryway and most affecting element of the director's surprisingly faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel.

The Creature, as the resurrected assemblage of assorted body parts is called both in the novel and in this film, is both a horrifying and tragic figure. Del Toro spends the first half or so of his screenplay building up to and showcasing that first part of the character, only to genuinely astonish us with just how poignant the existence of his version of the Creature actually is.

Shelly laid the groundwork for that, of course, and del Toro has enough respect for the author's singular creation to stay true to that foundation, while also adding a touch or two of his own advising that amplify the unthinkably lonely and uncertain nature of this character. In Jacob Elrodi, the filmmaker has also found an actor who, even behind what must be layers upon layers of elaborate makeup and prosthetics, imbues the Creature with such deep, existential sadness that the performances almost overshadows the other elements of the film.

That is quite the testament, too, because del Toro is as fascinated with the particulars of design as he is his monsters, after all. Here, he renders this world of 19th century Switzerland and Scotland as one of grand estates and a grander Gothic castle, as well as the chill of a spacious cottage and the biting frost of the northernmost point to which any human has traveled at that time. Every setting in this film is as inhospitable and ambitious as its title character or as solitary as its real star, the poor creature who only knows misery and a longing for death but cannot quell the former or achieve the latter.

The eponymous figure, of course, is Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, who's a bit but not distractingly too broad), the son of a strict doctor (played by Charles Dance) and an earthbound angel of a mother (played by Mia Goth). After the deaths of both his parents, Victor attends medical school with the aim of finding a way to put an end to death itself. His experiments, put on display before a university disciplinary board that will quickly remove him from their institution, are so far advanced that he brings a mangled, mutilated corpse to life in front of a full auditorium.

Of all the horrors on display here, the sight of a man's body, with its brain exposed and only one arm and the exposed lungs gasping for breath from the void beneath its ribs, might be the most terrifying one of all. Del Toro lingers on the sight of the inexplicable thing, both on account of the effects animating it are so shockingly convincing and because the memory of that vision immediately returns to us as soon as the Creature is born. For this barely half of a body to cheat death, it looks as if it pleads to return with every motion. That, in a way, is the existence of the film's central character.

Those who know the source material are also aware we meet the Creature well before that moment of resurrection, since del Toro maintains the novel's framing device, as well. That has Victor in the Arctic, rescued by a team of explorers searching for the North Pole, and knowing that his creation will soon come to kill him. The stranded ship, trapped in ice, is as fine a metaphor for the folly, peril, and potential doom of unchecked ambition in the face of the unknown and the naturally forbidden, and the Creature's violent attacks on the ship's crew as he hunts for his maker are the visceral consequence of the unnatural pursuits of these two men—Victor and the ship's captain (played by Lars Mikkelsen).

Following the prologue, Victor tells his story of personal tragedy leading him to professional obsession, as well as how the betrothal of his younger brother William (Felix Kammerer) to Elizabeth (also Goth), the niece of an inordinately rich weapons manufacturer named Henrich (Christoph Waltz), gives him the capital to pursue his dream of conquering death in earnest. When Victor arrives at that castle that will house his laboratory on a plateau in the Scottish highlands, the structure is so imposing that makes little figures out of anyone near it.

It and its rooms, particularly a space—with a pit funneling into oblivion—where Victor will set up his intricate lightning rod to channel electricity into dead flesh, are like something out of dream. Because it is del Toro's imagination powering them, those spaces are soon filled with nightmarish sights of corpses and saws chipping at bone and a hunched-over body with its peeled back for all to see. We expect the fictional science of the material to give the filmmaker's creativity free reign, but there is something otherworldly about everything here (Dan Laustsen's cinematography highlights the shadows, the sickly greens, and, of course, the bloody reds). It is, as the novel's subtitle suggests, akin to a myth brought into the real world.

The film's horror is in this first chapter, but its unexpected payoff in the second half, when the Creature takes over the narrative, is how much compassion the film brings to its depiction of its monster. Beyond the melancholy pools of the actor's eyes, Elordi's performance is almost entirely physical—from the Creature's tentative first steps and childlike curiosity about everything to the way, as Victor and the world continue to reject this being, he conveys the sense of, perhaps, an abused animal with an instinctual reflex to lash out at any potential threat. Once the Creature finds his voice, it's reminiscent of those raspy gasps from Victor's early experiment—only this project can speak of the terrible pain its every moment of, in this version, immortality is.

With Frankenstein, del Toro may only communicate the eponymous scientist's ambitions in rough strokes, although the boldness and ingenuity of the visuals surrounding it compensate for that. Once the Creature arrives and takes hold of the story, though, the film comes to potent and, as odd as it may seem, tender life.

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