Frankenstein (2025) arrives drenched in symbolism: fire and water, blood and milk. Still it manages to come out emotionally dehydrated.
This is a review. The author is responsible for opinions expressed in the text.
Film: Frankenstein
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Released: 27-10-2025, Netflix
Director Guillermo del Toro’s approach is visually extraordinary. It is a lovingly constructed production with a heavy emphasis on grand sets and exquisite costuming. The screen is saturated in blues and reds, and del Toro abandons the classic sickly-green monster hues for chalky, marble tones. Victor’s world is colour-coded so aggressively that even his beverages participate: he drinks condensed milk while everyone else enjoys red wine. After his mother’s blue-faced death, Victor shifts into black and scarlet, wrapped in a red stewardess-style scarf.
The visual boldness often works, but at times it veers into excess. The CGI wolf attacks feel airlifted from another, less discerning film and leave little to the imagination. The recurring flaming angel sequences resemble the rave-animatic backgrounds of a commercial techno festival. These scenes are memorable, but they also reveal how often the film sacrifices psychological depth in favour of operatic spectacle.
While the CGI-optics leave something to be desired, Jacob Elordi’s performance as the Creature is outstanding. He gives the Creature aching vulnerability and intelligence, almost enough to redeem the film’s emotional shortcuts. Even under layers of prosthetics, he radiates tenderness and, inconveniently for the plot, attractiveness.Oscar Isaac sells Victor’s cruelty and mania with conviction, despite the film flattening him into a traumatised tyrant rather than Shelley’s haunted scientist. Mia Goth, as Elizabeth, is measured and convincing, but the script gives her little to work with. Elizabeth is written more as a symbolic counterpart, rather than a fully fleshed out character. Goth has the charisma to suggest a life beyond these archetypes, but the film rarely allows her to inhabit it.
Narratively, Frankenstein keeps much of Shelley’s structure but discards her nuance, and in doing so it softens the moral stakes. Book-Victor is complex: a prodigal son in a loving family who stumbles into monstrosity through obsession and cowardice. Del Toro’s Victor is rewritten through convenient trauma, reshaped into a boy brutalised into ambition by an abusive father. Meanwhile, the Creature is absolved of the novel’s violence and reimagined as a saintly victim. The ending feels unearned.
The female characters suffer most from this streamlining. Elizabeth is more present but still largely symbolic, and Victor even proclaims that his greatest pain was being “denied” by her. Other women exist mainly as mothers or martyrs. The result is a world that feels strangely airless, populated by two men locked in a mythic loop rather than embedded in real human relationships.
Still, there is an undeniable pleasure in watching a filmmaker build a world with such care. Del Toro’s commitment to handcrafted sets and practical effects shines through every towering laboratory and ice-swept vista. And when the Creature finally tells his story, the film briefly crackles with the electricity it spends two and a half hours promising.
This review was first published in Lundagård #8 2025. Read the whole paper online here.
