Frankenstein (2025)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Shelley Shock

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

A long-gestating passion project from director Guillermo Del Toro, Frankenstein emerges as a magnificent, operatic spectacle, both dazzling and grotesque, marred only by a few pesky flaws.

It's 1857, and a Russian ship is stranded in the ice on its way to the North Pole. The crew spots a fire in the distance and rescue a weary Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). After crossing paths with a terrifyingly strong monster (Jacob Elordi), Victor tells his story. He was raised by his loving French mother and his strict, vicious father (Charles Dance), a successful doctor. The father trains the son in the ways of medicine, whipping him when he makes mistakes. When his mother dies, young Victor vows to find a way to defeat death.

Years later, businessman Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) agrees to fund Victor's experiments. It so happens that Henrich is also the uncle of Elizabeth (Mia Goth) who agrees to marry Victor's younger brother William (Felix Kammerer). Victor is also smitten with Elizabeth, but when she rejects him, he throws himself feverishly into his work, until his creation is complete: a creature whose consciousness is a blank slate. Victor grows impatient with the creature and tries to destroy it, but it escapes, learning the ways of the world until it finally decides to confront Victor one last time.

Mary Shelley's story, filmed as Frankenstein (1931) by James Whale, and adapted into a 1983 graphic novel by comics legend Bernie Wrightson, has always meant the world to Del Toro.

In his Frankenstein, he pours this love into the characters, showing Victor as being raised by a cold, vicious father. When it's his turn to become a "father" to the newly-created Creature, he has no idea how to show understanding or kindness, only cruelty and punishment. (When he throws open the shades, he declares "sun!", which sounds like "son!", then grows enraged when the Creature doesn't seem to comprehend.)

Del Toro then generates empathy by telling the Creature's story in the movie's second half, grappling with his overwhelming loneliness. As with Del Toro's Nightmare Alley, design here is supreme, a character in itself. Spaces are cavernous, yet intricate, ominous, yet detailed. A woman's dress is decorated with what looks like red spatters. In one scene, Victor rips off his shirt and tumbles into bed, wearing red gloves and sleeping under blood-red sheets. The Creature's design is almost elegant, a patchwork skin laid out in sections like plates on a tortoise shell.

Only Alexandre Desplat's spirited score doesn't always seem to work; in one gory sequence of slicing and dicing flesh, he matches it with music that sounds circusy. Moreover, the digital FX are far from seamless, appearing too rubbery and artificial. All in all though, Del Toro has given us a Frankenstein that's worthy of its subtitle, "modern prometheus."