I like how this film answers the question
"what if Frankenstein but hot?"
dir: Guillermo del Toro
2025
I was excited, I guess, when I heard about Guillermo del Toro making his version of the Frankenstein story. Now I feel a bit foolish because, ultimately, it’s just another version of a very familiar story.
And furthermore I’ve realised I don’t really need new versions of these stories. I don’t need another Dracula, don’t need more Frankensteins, don’t need more invisible people or werewolves, because I’ve seen them all, and they’re all just variations on very narrow themes.
It almost seems surprising that del Toro hadn’t already made a dozen Frankensteins up till now, because he’s made whatever else he wanted before, with all the gothic flourishes and insane costuming choices he could possibly fit into a flick even when there wasn’t enough story to justify it all (I’m looking at you, Crimson Peak, you wasted three good actors in that flick, but great costumes, eh?)
This is his dream version, his ultimate iteration, with the best cast he could get and presumably the biggest budget Netflix could give him. Maybe that means more people will see it than otherwise would have seen it on the big screen. Either way, he seems awfully pleased with himself, and people seem to be fans of it.
I thought it was okay. Okay is good enough sometimes. You go in expecting revelation or wonderment, but all you’re doing is comparing this version with the other versions you’ve seen, with the original story, with the other offshoots. You argue with yourself as to whether it’s in tune with the original, but if it hewed too closely to the original, then what’s the point. And where it varies, you wonder, “does that mean anything, to justify the change?”
It helps that what we might think of as the original story is nothing like what we think it is: it’s cobbled together from a number of places, not all of which originate with Mary Shelley’s original story. Most of it really is the repeated imagery from the James Whale movies Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, a lot of which isn’t in the book, and where the good doctor / abomination creator wasn’t even called Victor, he was Henry.
All that lightning and unholy electricity stuff wasn’t in the story, but we recall it because it became part of the DNA of cinema. But the part of playing god and coming to regret it, well, that’s all through every version, even if the reasons change.
In case what I about to write disappoints any readers, well, it’s not the first or the last time I’m going to do it. It’s not by design, it’s just inevitable. Tell me something is a masterpiece, and I’m going to find reasons to pick it apart; tell me something is mediocre or bad and I will find much to praise in it. It’s probably perversity, but who knows.
I love Oscar Isaac, I really do. I’ve loved many of his performances, and I think he’s a great actor, generally. He is not a good fit for Baron Dr Victor von Frankenstein in this flick. Most actors given this role fight the urge to overact, some fail, but rarely do they go as painfully over the top as he does here. It’s excruciating, in some moments. Also, the fuck is up with that accent? He’s a Bavarian baron, what’s with trying to sound like Stephen Fry (and ending up sounding more like a Cockney flower girl before Henry Higgins has his wicked way with her?)
Whenever certain American actors assay an English accent, whether they need to or not, they either try to sound like posh inbreds (The Windsors) or like Bert the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins, nothing in between, like there aren’t hundreds of other accents across the Kingdom that happens to be United mostly by spite and empire.
That’s by the by – okay so he’s obsessed with creating life. Why? Well, because his daddy (Charles Dance) was a terrible prick of a father, and Victor suspected his famous surgeon father maybe killed his mother when she was giving birth to his little brother. Life, from death, rebirth from the grave, maybe?
The Creature (Jacob Elordi) is a miracle, constructed from the body parts of the recently executed and from the dead of a Crimean battlefield, and seems intelligent enough. He even says Victor’s name. But Victor is a terrible person, whose idea of fatherhood includes beating someone until they say the thing you want them to say.
He, like God before him, becomes ashamed and disgusted by his own creation, so he decides to burn everything down, including the creature. But he does this to cover up a crime of having killed his benefactor, some chap with a German name (Christoph Waltz).
Now this is very important: Victor makes a lot of stupid decisions throughout the story. If he didn’t make bad decisions he’d make no decisions at all. No, that’s not quite right. He does dumb things and then blames it on the Creature, because what else are you going to do? He’s right there, aching to be blamed for something.
That benefactor, who I dismissed so dismissively, was kinda crucial to getting things happening, but he at least has a reason for this unholy project: he, like many a rich person, thinks he can cheat death if he just spends enough money and yells at people enough. He bought a literal waterworks building in order to let Victor achieve his dream (of cobbling bits of dead humans into a human shape and then animating it). But it was all for the purposes of having his syphilitic brain put into a new body.
Damn, that fear of death means people will do anything and pay anything to avoid facing their own mortality. When it’s revealed that this was Heinrich’s plan all along, it’s at a laughably melodramatic point which just means someone’s going to have to die for no good reason else no further progress could be made.
It complicates things further that Heinrich is also the uncle / guardian for Victor’s younger brother’s fiancé Elizabeth, who unsurprisingly looks a lot like Victor’s dead mother, because she’s also played by Mia Goth. In a rare moment of humanity expressed by Victor, he wishes this redhead was his instead. That is the only believable element in a nearly three hour movie. And yet even that is tainted by the knowledge that his desire for Elizabeth is really for his dead mother. Oedipal much?
Of course no doubt because this is the kind of flick this is (the kind of psychodrama that del Toro thinks is gothic, sensual and lushly romantic), no doubt Victor will end up killing Elizabeth, and also blame that on the Creature. But who cares, really? No one, that’s who.
Maybe Elizabeth had some affection for the younger Frankenstein, but she too realises, once she spends time with the Creature, that really they’re made for each other. She sees something in the beast that no-one else can, because all they see is some hideously malformed golem made of partially decomposed flesh. They don’t see the beauty and the gentleness that he carries inside.
These stories always try to have their cake and eat it too with the Creature. He’s misunderstood, he’s badly treated, but he also rips people’s heads off if he gets angry. He wants to be gentle, but then people shoot him in the face whenever they see him standing around. He wants to learn language and express himself, but through knowledge comes insight into his condition, and he realises how desperately alone he will be for all of his days. Heinrich, dead on the floor of the waterworks, couldn’t stand the thought of dying: the Creature cannot die, no matter what he does.
The film opens with the Creature rampaging and killing a whole bunch of silly sailors: he is tall and strong and not really stoppable, not for long, and all this he is doing in order to destroy his creator, somewhere at the North Pole. A Danish captain (Lars Mikkelsen) listens as Victor serves up his miserable tale of hubris and how everything is always someone else’s fault, for hours and hours on end.
Of course more talky talky happens, and it backtracks, as Victor tells his story up to the moment where he decided to destroy his creature (by pouring gasoline all over a very wet looking waterworks and setting it alight?), and then the Creature has the right of reply, telling his version (but not really), to catch us up on how they got to be trying to kill each other in such a chilly place.
The section of the story where the Creature holes up in an isolated homestead, secretly learning his letters, and helping out the family that lives there without their knowing (and with these hunters occasionally trying to kill him without knowing anything about him), is so golden that it brings tears to my eyes just remembering it, or remembering how gentle he was with his rat friends. And of course there’s the blind guy (the great David Bradley), who befriends him and wishes him well despite his deformities. Unfortunately, it’s also from him that he eventually learns of Milton’s Paradise Lost such that he now has a terrible frame in which to place his own existence: like Adam he was created against his will, and yet it is more the fallen angel Morningstar that he resembles, denied heaven he seeks to turn the world into hell.
When even this small respite is taken from him, by Nature, by the meanness of hunters, he returns to Victor demanding that he create him a companion, in order that he not be alone all the rest of his days, however many they may be. At first, considering the emphasis on Elizabeth, I thought the flick was going to go the way the Kenneth Brannagh version from the 90s (with Robert De Niro) as the creature), or maybe even further back for the Bride of Frankenstein, but del Toro chooses the easier route, following the novel, with Victor realising if he fucked up the first time, well, doing it again so that these two Creatures could create more life out of death would somehow be even worse.
Very surprising for me is the way that del Toro chooses to end the film and resolve the story, because it ends up being genuinely affecting, and perhaps it’s out of place compared to what we’ve been watching for nearly three hours. But it works, perhaps better thematically than in terms of catharsis, and that’s okay.
On his worst days Guillermo del Toro is a way better director and storyteller than Tim Burton, way better. Why am I comparing the two: well, it’s because there were times during this incredibly monstrous running time that I felt like I was watching a Tim Burton movie, which is fine. Burton as well has always been obsessed with gothic imagery, the grotesque, tweeness and whimsy; it’s just not something we associate with del Toro. It hurts me to say it, but there are sections here that feel so Burtonesque I was worried Johnny Depp was going to wander onto the screen.
Even with the really great performances from Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth, and anyone not called Oscar Isaac, I just don’t think this is different enough to justify its existence. Even with the amazing costuming choices, the great set design, how solid it all look; it’s still just another version of an overly familiar story. I know it sounds churlish and ungrateful, but what are you going to do, set fire to me?
Not bloody likely.
7 times the best version of this story is still Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match by Sally Thorne out of 10
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“I found what I am. What I'm made from. I am the child of a charnel house. A wreckage, assembled from refuse and discarded dead. A monster.” – get over yourself already, buddy - Frankenstein
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