A Gothic Opera That Beats with a Human Heart
There are films you watch, and then there are films that watch you back—that peer into the darkest corners of your soul and ask questions you’ve been avoiding. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is the latter. Just like every del Toro film I’ve experienced, this one wraps itself around you like a velvet shroud, visually rich as Baroque art but drenched in gothic sensibility. I haven’t yet read Mary Shelley’s novel, so I can’t speak to its faithfulness as an adaptation, but as a cinematic experience? It’s devastatingly beautiful.
The Visionary Behind the Monster
Del Toro has been circling this project like a moth to flame for over 25 years. He’s called Frankenstein his “favorite novel in the world” and described the making of this film as a near-religious experience. Growing up Catholic in Mexico, he never quite understood the saints—until he saw Boris Karloff shamble across the screen in James Whale’s 1931 masterpiece. In that moment, young Guillermo found his religion: monsters.
This isn’t just another adaptation cranked out by a studio looking for IP to exploit. This is a passion project in its truest form—a filmmaker pouring his autobiography into someone else’s story and making it wholly his own. Del Toro brings a Mexican Catholic perspective to this very European tale, infusing it with what Oscar Isaac describes as “high passion all the time.”
The film’s visual language speaks to del Toro’s obsessive craftsmanship. He insisted on practical sets—fully constructed laboratories and ships—rejecting digital shortcuts and AI simulations. “I want old-fashioned craftsmanship: people painting, building, hammering, plastering,” he declared. You can feel that tangible reality in every frame. The production design recalls Crimson Peak in its gothic grandeur, with cinematographer Dan Laustsen (who also shot The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley) creating painterly images that live somewhere between nightmare and dream.
Victor Frankenstein: The Artist as Monster
Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein is not the frenzied mad scientist of popular imagination, but something more unsettling—a tortured artist who views his laboratory as a stage. Isaac brings a “punk rock energy” to the role, playing Victor as a misunderstood bohemian provocateur rather than a traditional academic. He’s as much sculptor as surgeon, viewing the creation of life as an act of artistic expression.
But Isaac also captures Victor’s fundamental cruelty. This Victor is the real monster of the piece, his ego-driven ambitions masked by a veneer of scientific progress. The film doesn’t shy away from making him responsible for nearly every death—not just spiritually, but directly. He’s abusive, manipulative, and cowardly, hiding behind pride when confronted with the consequences of playing god.
What makes Isaac’s performance remarkable is how he renders Victor human despite his monstrosity. He’s shaped by generational trauma—an abusive father who treated him as a student rather than a son, and the death of his beloved mother during childbirth. Victor’s quest to conquer death is as much about unresolved grief as it is about ambition. He’s a man wrestling with his own demons while creating new ones.
The Creature: Jacob Elordi’s Career-Defining Performance
If there’s a single reason to watch this film, it’s Jacob Elordi’s transcendent performance as the Creature. Elordi underwent hours of prosthetic application—42 individual silicone pieces applied over ten hours—but beneath the makeup, he radiates a vulnerability that breaks your heart.
Del Toro and creature designer Mike Hill made a deliberate choice to keep the Creature beautiful rather than grotesque. With his sculpted cheekbones and soulful brown eyes, Elordi’s Creature challenges our expectations. He looks like an alabaster statue come to life, with contour-like scars and an ethereal quality that’s simultaneously fragile and powerful.
But it’s Elordi’s performance that truly stuns. Drawing inspiration from Japanese butoh dance and his own golden retriever’s innocent movements, he portrays the Creature’s evolution from newborn being to mature individual with astonishing emotional depth. Every gesture, every grunt before he learns language, carries immense weight. You can see the wheels turning behind those expressive eyes as the Creature tries to make sense of a world that recoils from him in horror.
The film gives the Creature what few adaptations do—a voice. Not just literally (though his journey to language is one of the film’s most moving elements), but metaphorically. We experience the world through his perspective, feeling his confusion, his yearning for connection, his growing rage at rejection. When he finally speaks, articulating his pain in poetic language that springs from del Toro’s own philosophical mind, it’s devastating.
Elordi’s Creature learns language from David Bradley’s Blind Man, adopting the role of “Spirit of the Forest” and experiencing genuine connection for perhaps the only time in his existence. These scenes showcase Elordi at his most vulnerable, playing the Creature with childlike wonder that slowly calcifies into something darker as the world’s cruelty takes its toll. His final line—”I am obscene to you, but to myself I simply am”—captures the tragedy at the heart of Shelley’s tale.
Elizabeth: Mia Goth’s Ethereal Beacon
Mia Goth’s Elizabeth Lavenza is far more than the dutiful love interest of previous adaptations. Del Toro described her as “an amalgam of me and Mary Shelley”—the most intelligent character in the film, the one who truly understands. Where others see only a monster, Elizabeth recognizes the Creature’s humanity. She educates him, embraces him, and becomes a beacon of light in the film’s dark landscape.
Goth plays a dual role, also appearing as Claire Frankenstein, Victor’s late mother—a deliberate choice that adds psychological depth to Victor’s obsessions and the film’s themes of creation and loss. As Elizabeth, she’s dressed in vibrant, eye-catching colors that make her stand out against the gothic gloom. Costume designer Kate Hawley incorporated entomological motifs—beetle wings, wasp-waisted corsets—to reflect Elizabeth’s interest in insects and botany.
One of Elizabeth’s most striking costumes is her final white dress, where white satin ribbons wrap around her arms like surgical bandages, deliberately mimicking the Creature’s appearance. It’s a visual metaphor that speaks to their connection and her tragic fate. Goth brings both fragility and ferocity to the role, commanding every scene with an ethereal presence that feels otherworldly yet grounded.
The Supporting Players
Christoph Waltz appears as Heinrich Harlander, Elizabeth’s uncle and an arms manufacturer who funds Victor’s experiments. While some critics felt this character was invented unnecessarily, Waltz brings his trademark precision to the role, providing an intellectual counterpoint to Victor’s mania.
Felix Kammerer plays William Frankenstein, Victor’s younger brother and the family’s golden child. The relationship between the brothers carries biographical weight—del Toro drew from his own relationship with his brother, making it feel personal and lived-in.
Charles Dance as Baron Leopold Frankenstein, Victor’s cold and oppressive father, embodies the generational trauma that drives Victor’s obsessions. Dance (who previously played a different version of Frankenstein’s father in the 2015 film Victor Frankenstein) brings gravitas to a man who treated his son as a student rather than offering paternal love.
A Visual Feast Dripping with Symbolism
Every frame of Frankenstein feels meticulously crafted. The color palette shifts between turquoise greens and glowing oranges, creating an otherworldly quality. Blood-red dominates key moments—Victor’s red gloves implicating his guilt, crimson skies and shadows that feel alive with menace.
Laustsen’s cinematography uses light like a pulse, as if the film itself were a living thing. The production design is breathtaking—from Victor’s crumbling laboratory tower (evoking Crimson Peak and Pan’s Labyrinth) to the fully practical ship trapped in Arctic ice. These aren’t just sets; they’re characters themselves, breathing and haunted.
The film draws visual inspiration from German Expressionism, with high-contrast lighting and elaborate compositions that recall the gothic romanticism of Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Alexandre Desplat’s lyrical score doesn’t try to be horrific—instead, it’s emotional and haunting, occasionally playful even during grotesque surgical sequences.
Themes That Resonate
At its core, del Toro’s Frankenstein is about the “other”—about recognizing our shared humanity even in those who seem most different from us. “The other is you,” del Toro explains. “Every time you debase the other, you debase yourself.”
The film explores creation and parenthood through the lens of Catholic guilt and Mexican cultural perspectives. Victor’s relationship with his Creature mirrors toxic father-son dynamics, generational abuse, and the ways we fail those who depend on us. It asks what it means to be human, to have a soul, to deserve love and understanding.
Forgiveness emerges as perhaps the film’s most powerful theme. In an ending that improves upon Shelley’s more pessimistic conclusion, del Toro offers redemption—not easy or unearned, but genuine. The Creature’s capacity for forgiveness in the face of unthinkable cruelty becomes the film’s moral center.
This is also fundamentally a story about loneliness and the desperate human need for connection. The Creature’s journey from innocent newborn to hardened outcast mirrors the experience of anyone who has ever felt rejected, misunderstood, or cast aside. In 2025, del Toro’s message of “xenophilia”—love the stranger—feels both timely and timeless.
Critical Reception and Legacy
The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival to a 14-minute standing ovation that moved del Toro, Isaac, and Elordi to tears. It currently holds an 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics particularly praising Elordi’s “revelatory performance” and the film’s visual craftsmanship.
Some critics felt the 149-minute runtime was excessive, that the film felt “overstuffed” with symbolism and ornate production design. Others noted that certain Netflix production values occasionally showed through, with some CGI elements not matching the practical effects’ quality. A few wished del Toro had stayed even closer to Shelley’s darker, more fatalistic vision.
But the consensus is clear: this is one of the most faithful Frankenstein adaptations ever made, while still being distinctly del Toro’s own. It’s a film that throbs with passion, that finds beauty in darkness, and that dares to give one of cinema’s most iconic monsters not just a voice, but a soul.
Final Thoughts: A Beautiful Monster
I walked into Frankenstein knowing only del Toro’s visual signature—that baroque richness married to gothic sensibility that defines his work. What I experienced was something deeper, more personal, more devastating than I anticipated.
This is a film about what it means to be cast aside, to be judged by appearance, to yearn for connection in a world that fears what it doesn’t understand. It’s about fathers and sons, creators and creations, the monsters we make and the monsters we are.
Jacob Elordi deserves every accolade coming his way. This is a transformative performance that strips away his movie-star handsomeness to reveal raw, aching humanity. Oscar Isaac matches him scene for scene, creating a Victor who is tortured and brilliant and monstrously cruel all at once. Mia Goth provides the film’s moral compass, a beacon of understanding in a world of willful blindness.
But ultimately, this is Guillermo del Toro’s triumph. After 25 years of dreaming, he’s created not just his definitive Frankenstein, but arguably the definitive Frankenstein for our age—a film that reminds us that monsters hold the secrets we long for, and that the real horror isn’t the Creature stitched together from corpses, but the cruelty we inflict on those who are different from us.
It’s visually rich like Baroque art, yes, but with a gothic sensibility that cuts straight to the bone. It’s a gothic opera soaked in sadness and snow, fierce and fragile and tragic. And it’s beautiful—so unbearably, devastatingly beautiful.
Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix after a limited theatrical release. Runtime: 2 hours 29 minutes. Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images.
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