Film review – Frankenstein (2025)

My notes on Frankenstein (2025)

The two long-term passion projects Guillermo del Toro was able to secure Netflix backing for were Pinocchio and Frankenstein – the two books read by Johnny Five in Short Circuit, as it happens, and both fables about the rights and responsibilities of creator to created and vice versa.  Arguably, Pinocchio and the Creature have divergent arcs – the one to becoming a ‘real boy’ by learning to be a better person (not lying), the other to becoming a monster by learning cruelty from a lot of real boys.  Del Toro doesn’t quite see it that way, and this take on Mary Shelley’s novel is also informed by many earlier adaptations – as in the James Whale 1931 film, Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) doesn’t work in secret but has a disapproving audience for his creative activities … as in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein, there’s a shock moment where the creature (Jacob Elordi) gets shot in the face … and as in Victor Frankenstein, Victor’s domineering father who gives him inadvertent lessons in bad parenting is played by Charles Dance.  There are even trace elements of Jack Smight and Kenneth Branagh here, as if del Toro wanted to acknowledge every finger which had been stuck in this pie.  Amazingly, given that the material has been worked over so often, del Toro finds new things to add – situations, characters, historical contexts – to an old, old story which always seems relevant.

It’s the 1850s – sixty or seventy years after the book is set, perhaps fitting into the time frame of the Hammer series – and A Danish ship is trapped in Arctic ice, with a Captain (Lars Mikkelsen) who’s facing mutiny because he wants to plough on to the Pole no matter what the cost.  An explosion draws attention to Victor, a broken man with a detached brass leg, and the crew skirmish with the creature, who has a Hulk-like frenzy of tossing sailors about (fair enough – the Hulk was originally drawn to resemble the Monster) before we get two distinct halves of flashback narrative, one told by Victor (the film is oddly reticent about using his famous second name much), the other by his creation.  Like Hammer and Branagh, del Toro gives us the childhood of Frankenstein (Christian Convery is the lad) which gives some insight into the wretched man he grows up to be.  Relationships are changed – young William and boring Henry are mashed together into a sympathetic brother (Felix Kammerer), Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is now engaged to the brother and instinctively takes against Victor, and an older mentor, Harlander (Christoph Waltz), answers the question of who funds Frankenstein by paying for a converted water-processing plant to serve as mad laboratory and encourages Victor to pick over a nearby battlefield of some unspecified 1850s war for raw materials.  In another Hammer touch, which resonates with the techbros of today, Harlander has a hidden agenda – he’s dying of syphilis and wants his brain put into the perfect (and possibly unkillable) body Victor has stitched together.  Like James Whale, del Toro makes a fuss about the brain then forgets all about it as the creature seems to be a blank slate when brought to life in a splendid crackle of Wagnerian effort.

Victor doesn’t instantly reject his patchwork person, but gets weirdly jealous as Elizabeth bonds with the tall newborn … and eventually pettishly pulls the Bride of Frankenstein do-not-pull lever to blow everything up, which does for his own leg and casts the creature out into the world.  Here, we get the blind philosopher (David Bradley) and his family – but del Toro also throws in a pack of wolves whose depradations the monster gets blamed for.  The business of creating a mate is raised but dropped before the project starts – Goth has already played two roles (the first as Victor’s mother) and is rooked out of her chance to be the Bride, perhaps because Helena Bonham-Carter did that act in 1994.  As has often been the case with del Toro’s revisitings of the horror films he loves, some of the darker elements are pruned – this creature is never a monster or even much of a threat and in a new twist he’s completely innocent of several of the crimes ascribed to him, since Victor has a bad habit of accidentally killing people and then blaming the creature.  Isaac and Elordi are both good as romantic outcasts – but Isaac is playing the sort of all-round baddie del Toro set up for falls in Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water while after the prologue battle Elordi is a Milton-reading, Shelley-quoting sensitive soul rather than a vengeful, implacable, cruel daemon who relents only when his creator is on the point of death.

This is as rich visually and aurally as any of del Toro’s movies and it’s full of effective bits and pieces of acting – I like to think the range of British accents found in this sort-of-Swiss countryside is a homage to Hammer and Black Park – with occasional outstanding arias.  In its meld of auteur and much-hashed-about material, del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) makes an interesting double bill with Luc Besson’s Dracula (2025) – also with Waltz – and establishes yet again that this brace of conjoined horror core texts are nowhere near exhausted.