Frankenstein (2025)
For decades, Guillermo del Toro has harboured dreams of bringing Mary Shelley’s creation to life. Not literally, one hopes, though given the director’s particular obsessions, it wouldn’t be entirely out of character. His 2025 adaptation pulses with the kind of passionate investment that only comes from a lifetime spent thinking about monsters, outsiders, and the uncomfortable questions they pose about the rest of us.
Set in Victorian-era 1857, the film follows Dr Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature (Jacob Elordi) to life through a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both creator and creation. Del Toro has opted for emotional devastation rather than conventional horror, which feels appropriate. After all, Shelley’s novel was always more concerned with abandonment and consequence than jump scares.
The structure itself proves intriguing. The production begins in the Arctic, where creator and creature have become hunter and hunted, before spinning out the tale of how this tragic relationship came to be. We’re plunged into ice and desperation before understanding how anyone ended up there, which creates a certain propulsive dread even when we know the destination.
Isaac’s Victor is less mad scientist than utterly convinced genius, a distinction that matters considerably. He’s driven by childhood loss and an ego of truly spectacular proportions, the sort of man who believes ordinary ethics simply don’t apply when you’re pursuing eternal life. Fair enough, perhaps, except the film never quite lets us forget that this is also a man attempting to seduce his own brother’s fiancée. Priorities, Victor.
Jacob Elordi delivers what can only be described as a career-defining performance under circumstances that would challenge any actor. His creature evolves from a wordless, powerful beast into a being of startling intelligence and literacy, capable of profound sensitivity, gratitude, and sorrow. Watching this abandoned soul discover language, literature, and the crushing weight of self-awareness proves genuinely affecting. There’s a particular moment involving a mouse that manages to be more devastating than most films achieve in their entirety.
The film does stumble, though. Several critics have found Isaac’s performance histrionic and one-note, with the character’s strutting arrogance and manic declarations of genius occasionally crossing into territory that nearly derails the film. The imbalance creates real problems. We don’t engage properly with the story until Elordi’s creature gains consciousness and complexity, which doesn’t happen until well past the first hour. At 149 minutes, that’s asking rather a lot of an audience’s patience.
Whether Victor’s insufferability represents a deliberate choice remains unclear. Del Toro obviously wants our sympathies with the creature, and making Victor thoroughly unpleasant certainly accomplishes that goal. But it also means we’re watching a fundamentally lopsided relationship, which undercuts the tragedy Shelley embedded in her original text. The novel worked precisely because both creator and creation deserved our empathy, even when neither deserved our approval.
Visually, the film never falters. Shot in Toronto and Scotland, del Toro’s production design creates drawing rooms that vanish into shadow and landscapes vast enough to swallow their inhabitants whole. Alexandre Desplat contributes a score that understands when to swell and when to retreat. The creature design itself stands as a testament to practical effects work at its finest, eschewing digital convenience for something tangibly present and disturbingly alive.
The film’s thematic resonances feel particularly sharp in 2025. Questions about what we owe our creations, whether children or artificial intelligences or technologies that exceed our ability to control them, have never seemed more urgent. Del Toro doesn’t belabour these parallels, to his credit. He trusts us to recognise them ourselves.
I’d argue this represents a significant achievement rather than an absolute triumph. The flaws prove too substantial to ignore, the pacing too uneven, Isaac’s performance too divisive. Yet there’s something admirable about a filmmaker finally realising a decades-long dream and producing work that, whatever its imperfections, could only have emerged from his particular sensibility. Sometimes bringing dreams to life means accepting they won’t match the perfection we imagined. Both Victor Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro might recognise that paradox.