Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein Is the Best, Most “Aliiiiive!” Adaptation Yet: Review

It can’t be said that we, as a culture, are in desperate need of new movies about Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his monster. Literally hundreds of these adaptations have been made since the dawn of the moving image, every year bringing at least one new interpretation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale. In 2022, Rob Zombie remade The Munsters; in 2023, Yorgos Lanthimos brought us the Oscar-winning Poor Things; in 2024, Zelda Williams made her directorial debut with Lisa Frankenstein. And now it’s Guillermo del Toro’s turn.

The Oscar-winning auteur’s big-budget, sumptuously made Frankenstein features Oscar Isaac as the titular scientist, with Jacob Elordi as his creation. Many of the familiar plot beats from Mary Shelley’s original novel are present, including the framing device of Victor Frankenstein telling his story to a ship captain who has led his crew on a potentially doomed expedition to the Arctic. However, del Toro has remixed much of the original plot, keeping many of the characters and details but shifting them around to serve his vision.

Del Toro begins with a prelude in which an injured Victor Frankenstein is found on the Arctic ice and brought to the relative safety of the ship. Then, we get the story of Victor’s less-than-idyllic childhood, leading up to Victor’s attempts to win over the era’s most notable medical minds with his bold ideas about reanimating flesh. They reject his work, but enter Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a rich businessman — and uncle to Elizabeth (Mia Goth), the fiancee of Victor’s brother William (Felix Kammerer) — who’s willing to fund Victor’s experiments.

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A lot of money and accumulated body parts later, Victor has assembled his “modern Prometheus” and used an electrical storm to bring him to life. Unfortunately, he soon writes the Creature off as a failure after said Creature fails to develop a capacity for language quickly enough, kicking off a series of tragic events that bring the story to its climax.

In a sense, del Toro’s entire career has been building to this moment: Not only has the director talked frequently about his love for the classic Frankenstein in the press, but a parade of painfully human monsters have appeared in past movies like Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Shape of Water. That latter film won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, a remarkable achievement considering how that movie is most often remembered as “the one where Sally Hawkins has sex with the fish man.” (It is a beautiful movie beyond that fact — or perhaps because of it. What better way to explore the nature of humanity?)

Fueled by that creative passion, not to mention a lot of Netflix’s money, del Toro incorporates some steampunk flair to the action without overdoing it. Really, every period detail on screen is rendered beautifully, from the production design to the costumes — even the effects are downright flawless, with the line between digital and real smoothed other by both brilliant puppetry and CGI. The colors throughout tell a story, red and blue in strict opposition to each other, while del Toro finds just the right balance between too much and too little grotesquerie appropriate to the story.

Frankenstein (Netflix)

None of these aesthetic achievements hold back the cast, either. Oscar Isaac’s eyes capture the necessary madness, but his performance overall stays so grounded and believable that it feels totally separate from any of the many actors who have played the role in the past, from Peter Cushing to Gene Wilder. And as his creation, Jacob Elordi is pretty genius casting when one considers that full articles have been written about how maybe he’s just too tall. But beyond his height, he brings a level of innocence and hurt that really works here, and the prosthetic makeup doesn’t prevent him from drawing out everything vulnerable and relatable about his character. Netflix is keeping his full transformation under wraps (the press site includes no clear images of the Creature design), but the design beautifully captures both his humanity as well as his otherworldly nature.

The supporting cast pales a bit by comparison, largely due to the way they’re incorporated into del Toro’s remix. Christoph Waltz’s character ends up feeling like more of an afterthought/plot contrivance, while Mia Goth gets plenty of opportunity to distinguish herself as more than just a simpering bride-to-be; that character development unfortunately doesn’t translate into much in the way of active participation in the plot. Still, as complaints go they’re mild enough, especially given the depth of thought del Toro has put into the meat of his approach.

What’s most intriguing about often-adapted texts like Frankenstein is what we can learn from the choices made in the adaptation. As one example, Danny Boyle’s 2011 National Theater production of Frankenstein famously featured Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller trading off the roles every night, pushing the idea of man and his creation as a duality.

Del Toro’s approach, though, involves exploring this narrative as a story of creation as well as of fathers and sons. Hence the early scenes of the film, as the script gives us everything we need to understand Victor as a character, and thus his subsequent actions, by letting the tragic story of his childhood unfold. Victor inflicts the same sort of upbringing upon his creature that his own abusive father (Charles Dance, steely perfection) gave him, only realizing too late his mistakes.

Meanwhile, on the page, Shelley’s Creature was far more violent than del Toro’s; here, Victor ends up being responsible for far more of the story’s carnage, while the Creature retains more innocence. It doesn’t take too deep a dive into del Toro’s past work to suss out the reasons for why he wants his audience to feel more sympathy towards the monster; that’s always where his sympathies have been. And thanks to the love and care he’s put into telling this story, it’s not at all a challenge for the audience to go there with him.

Fueled by that love, the end result is something beautiful and meaningful — an adaptation where one never questions the need for it to be made. And that in itself is quite an achievement: Robert Eggers’ 2024 adaptation of Nosferatu was also beautifully crafted, but never felt essential. By comparison, there’s such humanity and spirit to what del Toro has done that despite the narrative differences, it genuinely feels like the definitive take on Shelley’s classic tale. He’s said what he wants to say about his beloved Creature, and we are better for it.

Frankenstein escapes the lab for a limited release on Friday, October 17th. It makes its Netflix debut on November 7th. Check out the latest trailer below.