Review: Was Guillermo del Toro Maybe Too Perfect a Choice for Frankenstein?

I love Guillermo del Toro. He’s one of my all-time favourite directors. As a lover of the monstrous gothic and phantasmagorical, I’m drawn to del Toro’s cine-literate tales that combine classic Hollywood stylings with an earnest embrace of the grotesque. Nobody loves monsters as much as he does. So, of course he had to make an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s his Bible, the very origins of the genres he has long called his playground. How did it take him this long to adapt the book that is practically the del Toro Rosetta Stone? Predictably, the end result is good. Perhaps also inevitably, its status as the perfect del Toro story means that his version is somewhat hindered by those mighty expectations.

(Image via Netflix.)

Funded by Netflix’s seemingly deep pockets, Frankenstein is certainly a sumptuous piece of work. Every scene looks gorgeous to the point of madness. The production design, the costumes, the locations (including a lot of stuff shot in Edinburgh, which made me do the Leo pointing meme every single time), all of it creates a vibrant and classically gothic world that feels both faithful to the book and to del Toro’s ethos. This is a filmmaker who rejects the grimdark shade of grey that has permeated blockbuster cinema, thank you very much. Consider it the gothic romantic, not unlike one of my all-time favourite films, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (RIP Eiko Ishioka, you would have loved del Toro.)

Del Toro has remained pretty faithful to the book, certainly more so than most adaptations of Frankenstein (it’s a book that, like Dracula, creators tend to treat malleably so that they can use its foundations to explore whatever issues or ideas they have.) Our pouty tortured genius Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) becomes determined to beat death after the passing of his mother, and his unorthodox approach to his craft leads to, well, you know. Del Toro keeps the Antarctica stuff, which a lot of adaptations cut. He also gives a lot of time to the monster’s side of the story in this pretty long picture. There was no way that we weren’t getting that, of course. Guillermo, we know you!

I’m also ready to make an important announcement. Jacob Elordi isn’t just tall: he’s also a good actor. I know, it took me a long time to come to a decision on this crucial cultural matter. I really had to think about this. Elordi just hadn’t clicked for me in other things I’d seen (sorry, still haven’t watched Priscilla yet but I’ve heard great things.) I still don’t know if he makes sense for Heathcliff. But as a gangling newborn monster who evolves into an eloquent but vengeful being, he nails it. His freakish height goes a long way in helping to convey the physicality of the creature in his early days, as he stumbles like a toddler and flinches at his creator’s cruelty with the instinctiveness of a dog in a thunderstorm.

It’s with Elordi and the monster’s journey that the film feels the most vibrant. Nobody ever doubted where del Toro’s priorities lay, but this does make the film feel uneven overall. Once the monster starts narrating his tale, Frankenstein just sits there waiting his turn. The fanfiction writers are sure to go wild with Isaac and Elordi at their freakiest, but there’s a moral ambiguity required to make Frankenstein more than just a man vs. God tale. We love the monster, but why stop caring about the man in the process?

(Image via Netflix.)

I think, sometimes, a filmmaker is maybe too right for a certain piece of material. Del Toro has been inspired by Frankenstein for his entire career, borrowing from it some of his most notable fascinations. You see it all over his Hellboy movies, The Shape of Water, even Pacific Rim. But here, there’s a reverence that stymies him, keeps him confined in ways that stop him from letting his freakiness out. Consider Crimson Peak, which wasn’t an adaptation of classic ghost stories like The Turn of the Screw but a loving homage to them through an original story. It gave del Toro the freedom to get odd, horny, violent, and earnest in ways a staunch adaptation wouldn’t have, but he still retained his understanding of the material. It’s not that Frankenstein is a bad version of Frankenstein. It’s clearly a very good one. But as a del Toro movie, I couldn’t help but yearn for something with more of those curiosities that make him one of my favourite directors.

When we get those moments, you can feel del Toro pushing past the boundaries he’s set for himself. Mia Goth, our modern scream queen, plays Elizabeth, the fiancé of Victor’s brother, as well as his mother. The oedipal pull adds a quirk to Victor’s motivation, made all the more intriguing by Elizabeth’s absolute lack of romantic interest in him. Indeed, she finds him quite pathetic, and that’s before she discovers he’s a madman who will ruin lives for his own cause. It’s a change from the book that was made for the improvement of the story and it works. Would that we had more such shifts.

Thanks for reading Gossip Reading Club! This post is public so feel free to share it.

The spectacle is gorgeous, and everyone here is working full throttle (shout out to Christoph Waltz for being, well, Christoph Waltz), but one wonders if aesthetic became the driving force over the ethical and thematic trickiness of Shelley’s vision. Don’t get me wrong, there are some gnarly moments here that are appealingly gross (del Toro always has a way of injecting the brutality of real-world violence into his off-kilter fantasies), but little interrogation of their meaning. Shelley’s book stands tall today not just because of its originality but because it’s a searing portrait of a toxic man besieged by his angels and demons. Most adaptations forget that, or struggle to balance those quiet revelations with the fevered intensity of the story and mood (Kenneth Branagh’s version is a mess, but it does capture that off-ones-tits furor quite well.) Honestly, del Toro did this evolution of man to monster better in Nightmare Alley.

Revel in the delicious visuals of Frankenstein, and perhaps enjoy it more as a soap than something more penetrating. Del Toro fulfilled a lifelong dream here, but I’m more interested in what he does with his own ideas.

Frankenstein premiered on Netflix today. I saw it during its Canadian premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. I did not see Oscar Isaac, alas.