[Rating: Swiss Fist]
In Select Theaters Oct. 24; On Netflix November 7
There’s something deliciously ironic about a director adapting Mary Shelley’s masterpiece with an eye towards revision and improvement. In the book, Victor’s hubris and arrogance are the authors of his doom, and director Guillermo del Toro has gone down a similar path with his adaptation (reinterpretation?) of Frankenstein. It’s a funny thing, too, because a reimagining of a book into film can be forgiven for the cuts it makes, but it is the additions that hobble del Toro’s version.
The new movie follows the basic outline of Shelley’s text, starting with a marooned ship trapped in the ice near the North Pole, whose captain, Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen), and crew encounter a wild-eyed man on the verge of death. This man, Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), relates his story to Anderson, starting with his childhood, moving to his college years as a medical student, and then to the obsession that brought upon his ruin. Convinced that God should not have an exclusive franchise over life and death, Victor explains that he set upon his quest to create life from scratch, reanimating a reassembled, spare-parts corpse.
Successful, yet horrified and disgusted at his triumphant apostasy, Victor abandons the Creature (Jacob Elordi), which flees and takes shelter in a hovel beside a peasant family in the countryside. There, the Creature learns to read and speak, and following his rejection by that family and society as a whole, it sets out to find its creator for some explanations and a favor. The two meet not as father and son, or creator and creation, but as enemies, and their showdown takes them to the ends of the Earth where Captain Anderson finds them both.
As far as the broad strokes of the novel, del Toro hits most of the main story points, though his path to get from the start to the finish is filled with several deviations. It starts with the Frankenstein family and Victor’s relationship with father, Leopold (Charles Dance), who is made into something of a villain, here. Victor’s dynamic with younger brother, William (Felix Kammerer), is also altered from the text, though nowhere is this more egregious than in the character of Elizabeth (Mia Goth), William’s fiancée (not adopted sister as in the novel).
Elizabeth is the niece of Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a wealthy doctor who wants to bankroll Victor’s medical research into the reanimation of the dead. Harlander doesn’t appear in the book, though, and except for the family the Creature stays with in the second act, very little of the movie’s middle hour has any relation to the text or any other iteration of this story. These deviations certainly aren’t for the sake of pacing or narrative expediency, either. Aside from some early prologue action near the North Pole, it takes a full hour for the Creature to make his appearance, and little of what comes after (peasant family and hovel aside) would be recognizable to devotees of this story in any imagining.
Far from the avenging angel of death that it is in the novel, del Toro’s Creature kills only in self-defense and has a Wolverine-like healing factor that gives 2025’s Frankenstein more of an MCU flavor and less of a gothic literature one. Instead of a carefully woven story about the corruption of man’s best intentions and the wages of sin, this version is little more than a villain-origin story, with Victor positioned as the near-unrepentant black hat. Isaac certainly plays the character as such and leaves little room for sympathy: something reserved wholesale for the Creature.
And it is this reinterpretation of the characters that hampers del Toro’s take on the classic tale. While Victor is hardly an innocent or hero, most versions of the story portray him as a well-intentioned man whose ego and ambition get the better of him. Far from the straightforward good versus evil battle del Toro offers up, here, Shelley’s story has always been a cautionary tale about the responsibility of knowledge and power, and the consequences of unchecked ambition.
These are the villains of the story, not Victor or the Creature.
The addition of Harlander and the reimagining of the Frankenstein extended family change many of these character dynamics that give the story its punch and staying power, and have a butterfly effect on a long movie made longer by these alterations. And while the thematic and character changes may only offend devotees of the book and older versions of the IP’s canon, it doesn’t do many favors for del Toro’s iteration. As already mentioned, it takes a full hour to bring the Creature to life, and there’s precious little suspense, action, and horror to be found afterwards.
The costume, set design, and makeup work pull their weight, however, as does D.P. Dan Laustsen, who isn’t afraid to bring light into a “monster” movie to compliment del Toro’s color schemes. And while Isaac is a mustache twirl away from a full-throated bad guy caricature, Elordi is exquisite as the Creature. Early scenes showing him getting used to his body and the environment around him are a masterclass of on-screen physicality, and pair well with del Toro’s shooting of the action scenes when the Creature gets to go ham.
On the whole, though, the film just doesn’t quite click, which is especially weird for a director that successfully tackled many of these same themes in Pinocchio back in 2022. Maybe it’s because del Toro felt the need to dumb-down the text or make it into something superhero-adjacent to connect with 2025 audiences, but the spark is absent, here, and the motley assemblage of spare parts never comes to life. Victor would call this a blessing (in any version of this story), but for audiences hoping for a heady mix of suspense and existential modernism, it’s just kind of a well-shot, too-long monster mash (minus the graveyard smash).
“Obvious Child” is the debut novel of Warren Cantrell, a film and music critic based out of Seattle, Washington. Mr. Cantrell has covered the Sundance and Seattle International Film Festivals, and provides regular dispatches for Scene-Stealers and The Playlist. Warren holds a B.A. and M.A. in History, and his hobbies include bourbon drinking, novel writing, and full-contact kickboxing.
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