FRANKENSTEIN (2025) - Film Review

I walked out of Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein feeling like I had been struck by something ancient and alive. Not lightning exactly, but something heavier. Something that hums in the bones long after the credits roll. It isn’t horror in the modern sense. It’s resurrection. It’s faith and madness and guilt and beauty tangled together and set on fire.

The film begins in the Arctic. A ship lost in the cold, sails torn to ribbons, men wrapped in layers of frost and fear. The ice cracks like broken glass beneath the weight of a story too old and too human to die. From there, Del Toro drags you through candlelit laboratories, fevered dreams, and lonely estates dripping with guilt. Every frame feels touched by divinity and decay at once. The cinematography by Dan Laustsen doesn’t just capture light; it sculpts with it. Rooms flicker between holiness and horror. Faces half-hidden by candlelight feel like religious icons one second and corpses the next.

Victor Frankenstein, played with aching arrogance by Oscar Isaac, is not the scientist of old hammer-and-beaker myth. He is a priest of obsession. A man who mistakes genius for grace. When he works, you can see the tremor in his hands, the exhaustion of someone who has stared too long into creation and seen only himself. The monster, brought to life by Jacob Elordi, is something else entirely. Not a brute, not a child, but a figure torn between worlds. His stitched body feels like a map of human failure. Every scar hums with sadness. Every movement feels deliberate, restrained, full of a fragile awareness that he shouldn’t exist and yet can’t stop existing. Mia Goth moves through Frankenstein like smoke, unpredictable, hypnotic, and impossible to contain. Her presence carries both fragility and defiance, a kind of trembling grace that keeps you watching even when she says nothing. Christoph Waltz, on the other hand, plays his role with measured detachment. He doesn’t dominate the film so much as orbit it, a man too clever for his own morality. His calmness has edges, but it’s the quiet kind.

The film never lets you forget the myth behind it. Del Toro doesn’t adapt Shelley’s book so much as he canonizes it. He treats it like scripture. The lightning doesn’t just bring life; it baptizes. The monster doesn’t simply rise; he ascends. It’s all delivered with the kind of reverence that only comes from lifelong obsession. You can tell this story has lived in Del Toro’s chest for decades. Every shot, every sound, every shadow feels like a confession.

And what shadows they are. The lab glows in shades of blood and stormlight. The countryside burns in sepia and smoke. There are scenes where the rain feels like it’s mourning, where the camera lingers on a trembling hand or the stillness of a body as if asking for forgiveness. Desplat’s score swells with tragic beauty, strings pulling you apart, then leaving you suspended.

Del Toro mythologizes his characters without losing their humanity. Victor is Prometheus chained to his own arrogance, condemned by his brilliance. The monster is Adam without a God, desperate for purpose, searching for warmth in a world that recoils from him. Their relationship is painted with tenderness and horror in equal measure. They mirror each other, and by the end you can’t tell who is chasing whom anymore.

What makes the film extraordinary is its refusal to rush. It lingers. It breathes. It lets silence speak. The moments between creation and consequence are stretched thin, shimmering with dread. You feel the cost of life, the guilt of invention, the loneliness of being seen as wrong. It’s a film about art as much as it is about flesh, about the terrible intimacy of making something that outgrows you.

Visually, it’s intoxicating. There’s a cathedral of light and glass where Victor first awakens his creation. The machines look like organs. The electricity flows like veins. When the creature rises, the frame turns holy. You believe in him the way you believe in a storm. Later, when he wanders through snow, wrapped in tattered cloth, the world around him looks biblical, like something painted by Caravaggio and shot through a prism of grief.

This Frankenstein isn’t a monster movie. It’s a requiem. It’s Del Toro at his most sincere, his most wounded. He’s mythologizing not just the characters but the act of storytelling itself, what it means to create, to love what you’ve made, and to watch it suffer.

By the time the film ends, the ice returns. The creature stares into the horizon, eyes full of the kind of loneliness only gods and orphans understand. The wind howls. The sea groans. You sit there, not moved by fear but by awe. Because Frankenstein is not about life or death or horror. It’s about the quiet horror of being alive.