Guillermo del Toro, “Frankenstein” (2025)
After many years of planning and delays, at last Mexican director Guillermo del Toro brings his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” to the screen. For the most part quite faithful to the novel, this film is a lavish and colourful affair best seen on the big screen with stunning sets, gorgeous costuming and great cinematography. At 150 minutes in length, the film can hardly be said to be compact, and its pace is not always consistent: there is perhaps too much exposition early in the film while later parts of the narrative seem sped up unnecessarily to keep it going. Deviations from the original plot seem needless and the subplots that result end up undeveloped. On the other hand, the acting is energetic, with lead actors Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi as Victor Frankenstein and his creation respectively giving great performances, and the rest of the cast giving able support.
The narrative takes the form of flashback – or two flashbacks rather, since the action is portrayed from two characters’ viewpoints – aboard a Danish ship stuck in thick Arctic ice en route to the North Pole. Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelson) is determined to discover the Pole first but his crew find a wounded stranger and bring him on board. Almost immediately the ship is attacked by a monster with superhuman strength and who apparently cannot die despite being pumped full of bullets. After several of the crew die, the monster demands the return of the stranger, who tells the captain that he is the scientist Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein then proceeds to tell his story.
After a childhood of abuse by his father (Charles Dance) who favoured his younger brother William, Victor resolves to overcome death and become a greater surgeon than Dad ever was. Victor gets thrown out of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh after reanimating a corpse but is given a financial lifeline and an abandoned tower to continue his experiments by wealthy arms dealer Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz). With help from brother William (Felix Kammerer), Victor builds his laboratory in the tower. Harlander pressures Victor for results and Victor is forced to harvest body parts from soldiers who died in the Crimean War (the film is set in 1850s-era Britain). When Victor is ready to reanimate a body assembled from these body parts, Harlander – already in the final stages of syphilis – offers his brain but Victor rejects it. Harlander attempts to sabotage the experiment but dies in a fall. Taking advantage of an electrical storm, Victor uses the electricity obtained from a lightning strike to reanimate the corpse.
The corpse – hereafter known as the Creature – revives, and initially Victor seems well disposed towards it. In next to no time though, Victor chains it up in the dungeons beneath the tower. William and his fiancée Elizabeth (Mia Goth) turn up to visit Victor and quickly discover the Creature’s presence. Elizabeth – who had previously rejected Victor’s advances – readily bonds with the Creature. Jealous of Elizabeth’s feeling towards the Creature, Victor tells William that the Creature killed Harlander and gets William to take Elizabeth – Harlander’s niece – away. While the couple go on their way, Victor destroys his laboratory by setting it on fire, hoping this will also destroy the Creature; but the Creature manages to escape while Victor himself barely escapes with his life – he ends up losing a leg.
From there the tales of Victor and the Creature diverge, with the Creature taking up residence in a cottage, where he befriends an elderly blind man (David Bradley) who teaches him to speak and to read. After the blind man is attacked and killed by wolves, the Creature is driven away by the man’s family; having returned to the burnt tower and discovering Victor’s journal and a letter, the Creature is able to read these items and learn of its origins. Using the letter as its guide, the Creature seeks out Victor, finds him – conveniently on the eve of William’s marriage to Elizabeth – and demands that Victor make a companion for him.
Through the narrative, told by both Victor and the Creature, a complex message about arrogance, accepting personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s decisions and actions, and the existential burden that superhuman immortals must suffer – seeing loved ones die while never being able to die – emerges. Unexpectedly perhaps, the film’s climax comes when Captain Anderson must decide whether to continue to the North Pole even as his men suffer and the ship is trapped in ice. The decision he makes reflects the depth to which he is touched by Victor and the Creature’s stories of abandonment and alienation, jealousy, the harm and violence they have done to each other and to others, and (this part is definitely not in Mary Shelley’s novel!) reconciliation and forgiveness.
The main weaknesses in this film concern the uneven pace of the plot – drawn out early on, appearing forced in later parts of the film – and director del Toro’s interpretation of the characters. In spite of its origin, the Creature is benign in character and any wrongdoing it does is due to Victor’s treatment of it or is done in self-defence. Through his arrogance and vanity, Victor ends up the real villain of the film. The one-sided treatment of both Victor and the Creature, without allowing for both characters to be capable of good and evil alike, reduces the potential the film may have had to be a truly great film; likewise the forced nature of parts of the plot, as in (for example) Elizabeth’s immediate bonding with the Creature the moment she meets it for the first time, weakens it. The subplots that involve Elizabeth go nowhere and one wonders why her character (much changed from the novel’s original Elizabeth) is included in the film.
With the cast he had assembled for “Frankenstein”, del Toro could have made a film as profound as “Pan’s Labyrinth” but ends up erring on the side of Gothic romance entertainment.