Review: Del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ Is a Gothic Masterwork
Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein (2025) - Courtesy of Netflix
I’m not going to lie — this was a film I had completely forgotten was even releasing this year. It didn’t hit my radar again until Netflix’s TUDUM event dropped the trailer, and the realization stunned me. How did I lose track of this? Frankenstein has always been one of my favorite — if not the definitive favorite — of the Universal monsters. But, what did I think of this new version of the monster? I loved it. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is nothing short of staggering — a film that feels less like an adaptation and more like a séance. It doesn’t merely retell Mary Shelley’s story; it resurrects it. From its brilliant opening frames to its devastating final moments, del Toro crafts a vision of Frankenstein that is dark, lyrical, and almost unbearably human, a gothic poem carved in flesh and shadow.
What’s most extraordinary is that del Toro refuses to treat the creature as a monster. This is not trying to turn Frankenstein into a horror icon (he’s been one for years). This is not a genre performance. This is a being born into loneliness, trembling before existence itself kind of story. The tragedy of Frankenstein has always been rooted in abandonment, but rarely has it been expressed with such fragile tenderness. Every flicker of expression, every breath, seems shaped by pain and yearning. You don’t fear the creature here… you ache for him.
Visually, the film is sumptuous without ever slipping into aesthetic vanity. It’s pure del Toro: moldy walls, candlelit corridors, bodies framed like baroque paintings, decay presented with the reverence of sacred art. Yet the design never distracts from the emotional core, it amplifies it, as if the world around the creature is rotting under the weight of what man has done. The production design feels tactile, humid, diseased, but almost beautiful in its ruin. Gothic not as style, but as moral architecture.
The film’s pacing is also exceptional — deliberately unhurried over its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, giving every moment of grief room to breathe. There are scenes that don’t just land, they hit like a train because del Toro trusts stillness more than spectacle. He lets silence do the talking. He allows us to sit in shame, desire, horror, and tenderness without ever over-explaining or softening the blow. It’s astonishing how quiet this film is allowed to be and how loudly that quiet speaks.
Where most filmmakers adapt Frankenstein as a tale of scientific caution, del Toro leans in harder to the original philosophical dread: this is a story about fathers who fail their children, about the violence of being seen as an error, about a soul forced into a world that has already decided it must not exist. The film is not about creation, it is about rejection. It is about a world that invents monsters, then punishes them for becoming what it made them.
The performances thrive in that emotional violence, with Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi delivering the standouts. They operate as the film’s oil and water — Isaac as Victor Frankenstein is ferociously controlled, a man defined by ego and a desperate need to be immortalized through his creation. Opposite him, Elordi’s Creature is a revelation — a performance that should genuinely be in the Oscar conversation. He doesn’t play the monster as a mythic ghoul, but as a child — terrified, curious, and slowly shaped into something broken by the cruelty inflicted upon him. The relationship that forms between creator and creation is disturbingly intimate: paternal, sacred, and quietly sadistic. del Toro captures what so many adaptations miss — Frankenstein doesn’t just build a body. He abandons a soul.
By the time the film reaches its final act, it’s no longer playing as gothic melodrama, it has become a full spiritual tragedy. Not a horror film about death… but a horror film about life against one’s will. And that is far more terrifying. Frankenstein is not only one of del Toro’s finest films, it may be one of the most emotionally faithful adaptations of Mary Shelley’s original text ever put to screen. It is art made of heartbreak. Cinema that bleeds. Horror that cries rather than screams.
Dark, poetic, and relentlessly human, this is the Frankenstein I have longed to see. And it exceeded it.
Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)
