The Verdict
Guillermo del Toro has waited three decades to make Frankenstein, and it shows in every frame. This is not a horror movie so much as a gothic opera: a 149-minute, lushly mounted retelling of Mary Shelley’s novel starring Oscar Isaac as the doomed Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Creature — a performance that may be the year’s most startling transformation. With an 85% Rotten Tomatoes score and del Toro’s signature tactile grandeur, it is one of the essential films of the year, even if its final act rushes a little.
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Director & writer | Guillermo del Toro |
| Starring | Oscar Isaac (Victor Frankenstein), Jacob Elordi (the Creature), Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Charles Dance |
| Source material | Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) |
| Runtime | 149 minutes |
| Rated | R (bloody violence and grisly images) |
| Venice premiere | August 30, 2025 |
| Limited theatrical | October 17, 2025 |
| Streaming | Netflix, November 7, 2025 |
| Rotten Tomatoes | 85% critics’ score |
The Story: The Dream of Creation, Revisited
Victor Frankenstein (Isaac) is a brilliant, egotistical young scientist consumed by the idea of conquering death itself. In his laboratory — part cathedral, part slaughterhouse — he assembles and reanimates a Creature from stolen body parts. What follows is the novel’s eternal tragedy: the creator recoils from what he has made, and the Creature, abandoned and articulate, demands the one thing Victor cannot give him — a soul to love him back.
Del Toro does not aim for a faithful page-to-screen transfer. He condenses and reorders Shelley’s narrative into a literary two-part structure — a prelude followed by two chapters told from shifting perspectives — that makes the 149 minutes move briskly. The Arctic frame, the ship, the ice: it is all here, rendered in storm-lit grandeur.
Elordi’s Creature Steals the Film
Let us be clear about the headline: Jacob Elordi is extraordinary. Towering, wounded, and physically transformed, his Creature is no grunting monster but a newborn philosopher — a being who learns language, reads, grieves, and eventually understands the cruelty of being unwanted by the only father he has. It is a performance of real ache, and it sits at the center of the film like a beating heart.
Oscar Isaac matches him beat for beat. His Victor is not a mad scientist so much as a magnificent coward — charming in the first act, rotting from the inside in the second. Isaac plays ego as a kind of disease, and the scene where he first confronts what his Creature has become is one of the film’s finest.
The supporting cast is impeccably chosen: Christoph Waltz brings his trademark menace to the military establishment circling Victor’s work, Mia Goth gives the story’s women a gravity the novel never quite managed, and David Bradley, Charles Dance, and Lars Mikkelsen fill the frame with weathered Victorian authority.
Del Toro’s Gothic Vision, Fully Realized
No living director stages the uncanny quite like del Toro, and Frankenstein is his most painterly film since Crimson Peak. The laboratories drip with copper and glass; the Arctic sequences are desolate and operatic; the creature workshop set pieces feel genuinely medieval in their dread. The practical effects work — prosthetics, animatronics, textures — is tactile in a way CGI cannot fake, though one large explosion sequence does betray its digital origins.
What distinguishes this adaptation is its emotional thesis. Del Toro has always said this is not a story about a monster but about fathers and sons — about the violence of being unloved by the person who made you. That theme, which runs through Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pinocchio, finds its purest expression here. The film asks whether a soul formed in monstrous circumstances can be forgiven, and it asks it in resplendent detail.
It is also, quietly, a love letter to the novel. Del Toro retains Shelley’s insistence that the true monster is the man who plays God and then runs from the bill. The creature’s literacy, his grief, his rage — all of it lands because the film treats him as the protagonist of the tragedy, not its villain.
Where It Stumbles
The film is almost too reverent. Del Toro’s idiosyncrasies — the voiceover-heavy passages, the tendency to explain a theme out loud just as the images have already said it — occasionally make the film feel like it is lecturing its own audience. And the final act, after two hours of magnificent accumulation, resolves in a rush that feels like a deadline rather than a decision. The ending works, but it does not quite sing.
There is also the lingering injustice of the limited theatrical window. A film this designed for scale — the ship in the ice alone is worth a cinema screen — deserved a wider release than the boutique rollout it received.
Final Thoughts
Frankenstein is a triumph of intent and execution: a lavish, haunted, deeply felt retelling of the most durable story in gothic fiction, made by the one director who has spent his whole career preparing for it. It may not dethrone del Toro’s very best, but it soars as an operatic epic — and Elordi’s Creature is the kind of performance that ends arguments about a film’s greatness on its own.
Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5)
Frequently Asked Questions
Where can I watch Frankenstein (2025)?
After its limited theatrical release in October 2025, the film streams globally on Netflix.
Who plays the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein?
Jacob Elordi plays the Creature, opposite Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein.
Is del Toro’s Frankenstein faithful to the book?
It takes creative inspiration from Mary Shelley’s novel rather than adapting it beat-for-beat, condensing the story into a two-part structure with a stronger focus on the father-son dynamic.
How long is Frankenstein (2025)?
The film runs 149 minutes and is rated R for bloody violence and grisly images.
Did Frankenstein premiere at a film festival?
Yes. It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on August 30, 2025, to widespread acclaim, with additional screenings at Busan, BFI London, and Morelia.