Frankenstein, 2025.
Directed by Guillermo del Toro.
Starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, David Bradley, Lars Mikkelsen, Christian Convery, Charles Dance, and Christoph Waltz.
SYNOPSIS:
A brilliant but egotistical scientist brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a thing of monstrous beauty. It feels like a film born from the dust drenched pages of an early edition of Mary Shelley’s classic novel that has been locked away from the world and only just discovered. This Academy Award winning master of hearts in darkness has achieved the same feat he did with Pinocchio and created something anew from this tale as old as time.
Split into three parts; the Prologue, Frankenstein’s tale and the Creature’s tale, del Toro’s script is a relatively simple one. The first half is narrated by Oscar Isaac’s Victor, as he recounts his life up to the point at which he is rescued half-dead in the middle of the Artic Tundra by Lars Mikkelsen’s ship Captain. We follow him from intelligent and insular mother’s boy to the justifiably arrogant London surgeon, intent on curing death, something he views as the ineptitude of God.
It’s during one of his grandstanding hearings, at which he reanimates a corpse to the point of it catching an apple, which is a horrifically sad moment, that his path crosses with Christoph Waltz’s mysterious benefactor Herr Harlander, who offers him the means to fulfill his darkest desires when the great-and-good of the medical world call blasphemy on his work.
Walking this dark path brings with it Harlander’s niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth), who is engaged to Frankenstein’s brother William (Felix Kammerer), and ultimately the creation of the iconic creature.
At a pivotal point in the dark drama the film switches to the monster’s story, and it’s here that del Toro’s fable really comes to life. Glimpsed in the prologue as a kind of Franken-Hulk, tossing sailors about like an MCU villain, del Toro’s creature is actually more akin to the amphibian man from The Shape of Water. He might tower over his creator, but close-up he is a giant of patchwork delicacy, all wonderfully brought to life by Jacob Elordi.
Delivering the kind of physical performance that del Toro regular Doug Jones (Hellboy) would be proud of, Elordi is the dark heart and lost soul of Frankenstein. Like a puppet shorn of strings, but not chains, he brings the creature to life like a newborn fawn, with ticks and mannerisms of someone, not something, discovering what it is to be alive.
The third chapter of Frankenstein is his awakening, and while it’s a familiar one to anybody au fait with Shelley’s story, Elordi’s take on the creature, and the macabre cruelty inflicted upon this tormented being, carries it and your empathy towards an emotional finale.
This is essentially a two-hander between Elordi and the terrific Isaac, but Mia Goth is integral to the film as the only person who can see monster and creator for who they really are. It’s another of those ‘she was born to play this’ roles for the actor, whose intrinsic other-worldliness feels so at home in del Toro’s sandbox. Her Beauty and the Beast scenes with Elordi spark with the kind of innocent chemistry that Frankenstein would love to harness, while her rebuttal’s of Victor’s advances only goes to accentuate how fragile his ego is.
Like the limbs collected from a frozen battlefield, you can have all the right components to make a great film, but unless the person putting them together can provide that jolt of life, the whole thing can fall apart into a grotesque, fleshy mess. Luckily this is del Toro passion project, and Frankenstein is as sumptuous and fat free as you might expect.
From the early shots of a red headdress billowing against the drab backdrop of a staircase, to the stunning funerial caskets of Victor’s parents, every pound of your Netflix subscription fee is beautifully rendered onscreen by a master craftsman. The set-design and costumes are exactly what you’d expect from del Toro, as is the horror. There are no shock tactics or gross-out moments, everything is designed with an emotional weight. Victor’s cadavers are posed with a painful sadness, and when they are intermittently brought to life, the effect isn’t disgust, it’s one of pity.
Another vital element in bringing this staggering creation to life is Alexandre Desplat’s score, which veers from brittle to bombast with a series of instantly memorable themes.
At the heart of the story remains the age-old debates about Gods and Monsters, nature versus nurture, and whether evil is born or bred. They are perhaps more relevant now than they ever were in a world in which empathy is in short supply, or is having its existence questioned altogether.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein finds the auteur operating at the highest level, coaxing a revelatory performance from Jacob Elordi, and resurrecting a 200-year old tale by stitching it together as a melancholy gothic tome on love and loneliness.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
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