"Frankenstein" (2025) dir. Guillermo del Toro

26th Oct 2025

Frankenstein (2025) dir. Guillermo del Toro
Date seen: October 24, 2025
Date reviewed: October 26, 2025

SPOILERS for both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation ahead.

In directing Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro knew he had one chance to get it right, and that’s why he waited so long. I read del Toro’s introduction to THE NEW ANNOTATED FRANKENSTEIN, written in 2017, and gleaned his connection with with Mary Shelley’s original tale profoundly. And indeed, his adaptation brings to life the grandiosity that is Romantic prose, with rich and indulgent color and costuming, and formidable sets that capture the extravagance of aristocratic wealth, the sublime of the natural world, and the spectacle of mad science in the popular imagination. Like Shelley’s novel, the true horror lies not in the blood and the gore but in the humanity (and lack thereof) of monsters and the men who make them.

But to call this film a faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Miltonian tragedy”, as the director and press insinuated, is a gross and elementary simplification. I suppose “faithful,” in the Frankenstein cinematic universe, only means that Robert Walton exists and that the scientist’s given name is Victor, both of which are true for del Toro. But this adaptation obliterates the nuance of the original novel by exaggerating the Creature as a victim and Victor as a villain. We no longer get to watch the young scientist’s transformation from misguided student to irredeemable narcissist because del Toro’s Frankenstein is despised from the start: spoiled and disliked by his own father, and eventually his younger brother and Elizabeth (who, by the way, is neither related to the Frankensteins nor primarily Victor’s romantic interest in this adaptation. While the original Victor called Elizabeth “sister,” del Toro’s Victor pines for his brother’s fiancée, who he calls sister-in-law). Meanwhile, we never get to question whether the Creature was justified in killing William, Henry, and Elizabeth, and in framing Justine, because del Toro’s Creature only killed William in self-defense, Justine and Henry as characters were omitted entirely, and Elizabeth was killed not by the Creature himself but by Victor Frankenstein’s misfire. The black-and-white characterization and the removal of critical characters serves del Toro’s interpretation of the novel — albeit a common and valid one, where the man himself is the monster — but leaves no room for another conclusion, or capacity to empathize with the scientist at all.

Del Toro clearly draws from Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 adaptation, which he described as having a “pretty much perfect” script, most notably in the “naked Eureka” scene and Victor’s request to the Creature to “say my name.” I see Branagh’s adaptation as a tribute to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the best compromise between book-accuracy and cimenatic brevity I’ve seen so far. Meanwhile, I see del Toro’s Frankenstein a well-produced tribute to every other tribute to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although the aging-up of William is unique — no other Frankenstein director seems to pass up the opportunity to kill an innocent child — as is having him marry Elizabeth, there is no other plot point of this film that I have not seen in a Frankenstein adaptation before.

But I will stop harping on loyalty. Film and prose are different mediums, so of course some translation is necessary — and just because the movie was different from the book doesn’t mean it was a bad movie on its own. I enjoyed my experience of watching this film, the first del Toro film I have watched. The horror is vivid but not overdone, and the lush imagery stunned and thrilled me. The bloody crimson of Victor’s gloves, the magnificent turquoise of Elizabeth’s dress, the grotesque yet sympathetic stitches of the Creature’s design, the glamorous wedding! The steampunk lab! The mirrors that Victor always stops to look into like the self-obsessed brat that he is. Frankensteins are often broody and stormy but del Toro’s Frankenverse had frills. Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi breathed such angst and tenderness into their respective characters, and I particularly liked the tenderness of their interactions during the Creature’s “infancy” — among the only scenes allowing Iscar Isaac’s Victor to show humanity. What made this movie worth the watch was the prowess of the leading actors and the quality of the production — 3.5/5 stars. I’m glad I caught it in theaters. I can’t say I’ll watch it again.

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Frankenstein (dir. Guillermo del Toro) screened in select theaters October 17-24, 2025, and will be released on Netflix on November 17.

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