Frankenstein

2025

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Starring: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Charles Dance

Words – Carly Stevenson.

When I heard that Guillermo del Toro was set to adapt Frankenstein, I was ecstatic. Who better to capture the spirit of Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking Gothic novel than the director of Crimson Peak (2015) and The Shape of Water (2017)? As anyone familiar with del Toro’s filmography will know, his empathy for so-called monsters – whether human or non-human – is one of the hallmarks of his style, so this project felt inevitable.

While by no means a faithful adaptation, del Toro’s Frankenstein is a love letter to the source material and its cinematic legacy. The two-act structure – an echo of Shelley’s epistolary narrative – allows the spectator to see events from the perspectives of both the Creator and his Creation, thereby drawing attention to the potential unreliability of their respective accounts.

Oscar Isaac is delightfully over-the-top as the titular Victor Frankenstein and Mia Goth brings a compelling sense of whimsy to the often-underdeveloped character of Elizabeth, but it is Jacob Elordi’s beautiful performance as ‘the being’ that stands out. Sad-eyed, articulate and capable of gentleness as well as brutality, Elordi’s creature is a far cry from what audiences have come to expect from this role.

Unsurprisingly, Kate Hawley’s costumes are exquisite. Elizabeth’s beetle-inspired dress – a gesture to the theme of metamorphosis and a nod to her love of nature – deserves a special mention. Equally impressive is Tamara Deverell’s elaborate set design. Every backdrop – from Victor’s laboratory to the hand-built ship used in the Arctic sequences – enhances the Gothic atmosphere and ensures the spectator’s total immersion in this highly-stylized world.
The laboratory scenes have the same Grand Guignol quality we see in Crimson Peak, and the film does not flinch from the vivid viscera of anatomy. It feels significant that del Toro – an advocate for practical effects – devotes so much screentime to the craftsmanship that goes into building a ‘monster’.

The decision to set the film in the 1850s (as opposed to the late 1700s, when the events of the novel take place) reflects del Toro’s interest in war as a backdrop to internal conflict. Throughout, Dan Laustsen’s cinematography evokes the visual culture of European Romanticism, most notably in the shot of Elordi’s creature framed against an Arctic horizon vista – an allusion to the sublime landscapes depicted in paintings such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818). As in all of del Toro’s films, Catholic imagery looms large throughout, reminding the audience of the theological implications of Victor’s Promethean ambitions.

For all its aesthetic and thematic complexity, the dialogue was, at times, rather on the nose; we don’t need to be told that Victor is the true monster. Moreover, I’m not convinced that endowing the being with supernatural strength and immortality adds anything to the story.
Nevertheless, the film’s departure from Shelley’s novel is, perhaps, its greatest strength: by emphasising the themes of forgiveness and redemption, del Toro encourages us to see Victor and the being through a lens of, in his own words, ‘radical grace’ and ‘radical hope’.

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