Guillermo del Toro’s long-coveted Frankenstein arrives as a rare thing: a horror film that aches with feeling. Working with a luminous cast led by Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, and Mia Goth, the filmmaker crafts a ravishing Gothic that marries terror to tenderness, reimagining Mary Shelley’s myth as an intimate tale of creation, responsibility, and the bruising force of love.
Del Toro frames the story like an icy confession: a shattered man pulled from the far north recounts the catastrophe he engineered, while the being he brought to life prowls the edges of the frame like a memory that refuses to die. The result is at once a chase, a romance, and a reckoning.
A vision of fathers, sons, and the cost of creation
This Frankenstein is anchored in the language of family. Isaac’s Victor isn’t a cackling madman but a son warped by cruelty, convinced he can command life to mend a primal wound. Del Toro renders the lineage of harm with unnerving clarity, drawing a straight line from a punitive father (played with glacial authority by Charles Dance) to a “parent” who wants a child in his own image.
Mia Goth’s dual presence—evoking both the adored mother and the brilliant, inquisitive Elizabeth—charges the drama with Oedipal electricity. The film’s boldest choice is to make the act of creation feel like a misdirected love letter: science in service of grief. When the experiment succeeds, it births a cycle, not salvation, and the consequences are written across stitched skin and silent rooms.
Performances that humanize monster and maker
Isaac plays Victor as a man who mistakes control for care. His gaze is hot with pride and panic, his tenderness brittle; he flinches at the very empathy that could save him. It’s a portrait of genius curdled into tyranny, more chilling than any lightning bolt.
Elordi’s Creature is a revelation of movement and memory. Towering and alabaster, he begins with a toddler’s curiosity—hands in water, fingers reaching for flame—then gradually acquires language like a fragile scaffold over pain. The vocal treatment gives his words a subterranean resonance, but what devastates is the clarity in his eyes: a person awakening to a world that meets difference with fear.
Goth brings flinty warmth to Elizabeth, a scientist at heart who sees potential where others see threat. Christoph Waltz slips in as an amoral benefactor whose funds stain the laboratories a vivid moral red, tightening the knot between ambition and exploitation. Every casting choice deepens the theme: the families we are born into and the families we choose.
A handcrafted Gothic: design, score, and sound
Del Toro’s imagery is sumptuous and functional—fairy-tale silhouettes built to cut. Needle-thin towers pierce cloudbanks; vaults hum with impossible machines; ice fields gleam like porcelain. A slashed-red motif threads through gloves, books, and wreaths, a lifeline of color against the ash-and-bone palette, reminding us that vitality persists even where cruelty reigns.
Costume designer Kate Hawley sculpts fabric like anatomy: corseted ridges echo spines, greatcoats whisper of scar tissue. Alexandre Desplat’s score swells with strings that weep and rage, binding romance to dread with exquisite control. It’s elite company—Desplat is a two-time Academy Award winner, and del Toro’s own mantel holds Best Picture and Best Director honors from the Academy—yet the craft here feels newly alive, not museum-piece prestige.
Why this Frankenstein matters now
More than two centuries after publication, Shelley’s novel remains one of the most adapted stories in screen history, as chronicled by institutions like the British Film Institute. Del Toro nods to legacy—James Whale’s 1930s classics, the operatic fervor of Kenneth Branagh’s 1990s take—while redirecting the lens toward the ethics of caregiving and the dignity of the Other. In an era negotiating questions of identity, autonomy, and chosen family, the Creature’s journey lands with uncommon force.
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival before a theatrical rollout and a Netflix debut, the film is poised to meet audiences both in grand auditoriums and at home. With a platform that counts well over 250 million members worldwide by company filings, Netflix all but guarantees this Frankenstein will enter the cultural bloodstream, sparking debates in dorms, living rooms, and film schools alike.
The verdict
Guillermo del Toro has made a Frankenstein that beats like a heart—scarred, resilient, and unafraid of love. It’s a work of precision and abandon, rich in performance and design, that reframes a monster story as a radical act of empathy. See it large if you can; let it haunt you either way.