Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025) - Review + Themes

The story of Frankenstein and his monstrous creation holds a hallowed place in the pantheon of cinematic horror. It is a myth so potent and so malleable that it has been endlessly revisited for over a century.

From the moment Boris Karloff first shuffled onto the screen with his iconic, flattened skull and neck-bolts, the tale has been a cultural touchstone. It has been interpreted through the gothic lens of Hammer Films, deconstructed in poignant comedies like Young Frankenstein, and given operatic scale in ambitious literary adaptations.

Even Kenneth Branagh and Bobby De Niro gave it a great crack.

After so many iterations, one must seriously question what new territory is left to explore.

What new life can possibly be shocked into this well-worn story?

Guillermo del Toro’s magnificent and heartbreaking Frankenstein provides the definitive answer. This film is not merely another version of a familiar tale; it is a deeply personal, painstakingly crafted work that feels like the project the director has been building towards his entire life.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein serves as the powerful culmination of his lifelong artistic obsession with misunderstood monsters, tragic outcasts, and the beautiful sorrow of gothic romance. It stands as arguably the most emotionally resonant and spiritually faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel to date, proving the story's terrifying and timeless relevance by holding an ornate, cracked mirror to the anxieties of our own complex world.

The Del Toro Lineage: A Career in Creation

This film feels less like a new directorial project and more like the inevitable, ultimate destination for a filmmaker whose entire body of work is a rich tapestry of sympathetic outcasts and beautiful, terrible horrors.

Del Toro’s profound empathy for the “other” is the central pillar of his filmography, a theme he has explored with increasing depth and artistry over three decades. This sensibility can be traced back to his earliest Spanish-language masterpieces, which established his unique voice.

In The Devil's Backbone, he found aching tragedy in the ghost of a murdered child, treating the supernatural not as a simple scare tactic but as a vessel for historical grief.

He refined this approach in his magnum opus, Pan's Labyrinth, where the morally ambiguous Faun and other magical beings become conduits for understanding the real-world horrors of fascism.

This career-long artistic journey finds its ultimate expression in Jacob Elordi’s Creature.

Elordi (Saltburn) delivers a transformative performance that is a marvel of physicality and restrained soulfulness, portraying the creation not as a grunting brute but as an intelligent, sorrowful being cursed with a consciousness he never asked for.

His movements, at once graceful and disjointed, recall the work of del Toro’s most famous creature performer, Doug Jones.

In his Oscar-winning film, The Shape of Water, del Toro found a romantic hero in the silent, persecuted Amphibian Man, and that same tender compassion is afforded to Frankenstein’s creation. This profound empathy is wrapped in the director's quintessential gothic romanticism.

The film’s entire aesthetic, a collaboration between Tamara Deverell’s ornate and decaying production design and Dan Lausten’s painterly, shadow-drenched cinematography, directly evokes the dark, sorrowful, and achingly beautiful atmosphere of Crimson Peak.

Every single element, from the creature effects that pay loving homage to the illustrations of Bernie Wrightson, to Alexandre Desplat’s haunting and melancholic score, feels like a refined signature from del Toro's previous works. They are all assembled here not as a collection of greatest hits, but as the perfected components of a singular, masterful machine.

Defining Shelley...

While it pays respect to its cinematic predecessors, Guillermo del Toro's version distinguishes itself by achieving a profound faithfulness not just to the plot, but to the very spirit and text of Mary Shelley's novel.

This focus allows it to emerge as what might be the definitive cinematic adaptation. Of course, Kenneth Branagh's ambitious 1994 film, which starred Robert De Niro (Brazil, Casino), certainly aimed for textual accuracy and a grand, operatic scale. It was a commendable effort to restore the novel's epic scope. However, del Toro succeeds on a deeper level by prioritizing the book's philosophical and psychological soul over mere spectacle.

His adaptation masterfully captures the core intellectual elements that are so often overlooked by other versions. We witness the Creature's slow, painful acquisition of language and intelligence, particularly in his moving scenes with a blind hermit played by the great David Bradley. This education is crucial because it makes his later, intense intellectual and emotional debates with his creator, Victor (a manic, charismatic, and brilliant Oscar Isaac), so incredibly potent.

Del Toro also leans heavily into the novel's pervasive sense of natural beauty and profound isolation, using the vast, unforgiving landscapes as a reflection of the characters' internal torment. The key to the adaptation's success is its narrative structure.

By brilliantly choosing to tell the story in two distinct parts, first from Victor's feverish perspective and then from the Creature's tragically clear-eyed one, del Toro gives a powerful voice to the voiceless. This narrative choice directly honors Shelley’s own literary device and ensures the audience's empathy is fully transferred.

The film’s ultimate triumph lies in this delicate and masterful balance. It captures the source material’s intellectual depth and moral complexity without ever sacrificing del Toro’s unique, heartbreaking visual poetry.

It is a film that stimulates the mind and shatters the heart in equal measure.

Themes for Our Time

In del Toro’s hands, a story conceived at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has never felt more urgent or uncomfortably relevant. Victor Frankenstein’s unchecked scientific ambition serves as a powerful and timely allegory for our own era’s anxieties.

His obsessive quest to conquer death, heedless of the consequences, speaks directly to modern-day concerns over the ethical boundaries of creation, from the potential sentience of artificial intelligence to the world-altering power of genetic engineering. Yet, the film's true, furiously beating heart is the intimate tragedy of parental abandonment.

In a stroke of genius, del Toro’s script introduces Victor’s own cruel and abusive father, a domineering patriarch played with chilling precision by Charles Dance (Alien 3, Game of Thrones). This addition masterfully reframes the entire story as a devastating cycle of generational trauma.

We see how cruelty is learned and how pain is passed down from one creator to his creation.

The central tragedy is not one of monsters and villagers with torches; it is the deeply personal story of a child who is violently rejected by his father, a theme that resonates with profound sadness in our contemporary age of societal alienation.

The Creature’s overwhelming loneliness and his desperate, often violent, search for connection and belonging mirror our own struggles in a world that can feel increasingly isolating. The film forces us to confront the novel’s enduring and uncomfortable question: who is the real monster here?

Is it the shunned, patchwork creation who learns hatred from a world that shows him none?

Or is it the brilliant creator, the father, who shirks his most fundamental responsibility and unleashes his own unaddressed trauma upon the world?

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is an unequivocal triumph.

It is a lavish, gruesome, and deeply moving epic that not only honors but deepens the power of Mary Shelley's foundational myth for a new generation.

The film is a declaration that this story is not just about the dangers of playing God, but about the failures of being human.

In the end, del Toro reminds us that the best and most enduring monster stories are never truly about the monster itself. They are, and have always been, about us. They are about our failings, our monumental capacity for cruelty, and our eternal, all too human need for compassion, forgiveness, and understanding.