Movie Review : Frankenstein (2025)
When you say the word "Frankenstein", it conjures a vision of a green blockhead monster with a steel bolt going through his neck. But if you dare saying that, someone who has read the novel will inevitably correct you and explain that the creature is Frankenstein's monster and that Frankenstein is actually the crazy scientist who made the thing out of dead people's limbs. That's because Mary Shelley's novel was always liberally adapted by people who didn’t really care. Well, until last year that was.
Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein is the closest thing to a faithful adaptation of the real thing. He cares a lot. Perhaps too much.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), a nineteenth century surgeon obsessed with curing death. He is nothing is not a deliriously ambitious man. So, he assembles a "being" made out of dead people's limbs and organs (Jacob Elordi) and shocks him to life, only to keep him chained in his attic. Horrified at his creation, he tries to destroy it by blowing up his office and this kickstarts a grudge that will take them to the very end of the Earth.
Gothy McGothface
I promised myself that I'd never watch another Guillermo Del Toro movie after sitting through the excruciatingly stupid The Shape of Water almost a decade ago, but watching movies wasn't my job then and it is now. I didn’t hate it and I didn’t like it either. Del Toro's Frankenstein is what Kevin Smith calls "just a movie" even if it cost 120 million dollars to make. It's adequate at telling the story the way Mary Shelley imagined it, but Guillermo Del Toro movies have a way of being mostly about Guillermo Del Toro.
My main issue with Frankenstein is that the characters are swallowed by the goth retrofuturist setting that keeps calling attention to itself. You’re never really invested in the characters, but rather in how Del Toro imagines then. Not only he cannot get out of his own way, but I don’t believe he wants to. He directs movies the way a puppet master runs the show. He never lets you forget his presence in the most annoying way possible. It’s like he doesn’t trust one an iconic novel to be good enough.
For example, the scene where Frankenstein’s monster comes to life is oddly focused around the phallic contraption used to channel electricity until the lifeless body of Jacob Elordi. The camera keeps panning up and down the shrewdly designed, highly imaginative tower as Victor Frankenstein runs around his crucified monster. Everything is oddly beautiful even if the character is supposed to be losing his mind. His house is disordered and decaying, but in an overflowing, luxuriant way. No one’s ugly. Nothing’s dirty.
Frankenstein doesn’t take place in the nineteenth century, it takes place in the goth utopia inside Del Toro’s mind.
About the Bolt Neck Blockhead
Why is Frankenstein not complete dogshit then? Glad you asked. Well, it’s so different from the classic cinema spin off Mary Shelley’s novel that it almost feels new. The dilemma it presents — is the monster the violent, soulleess creation or its creator? — doesn’t feel new at all, but Shelley was more or less the first person to raise the question in 1818 and the gap between the blooming consciousness of a walking corpse and the bumbling bolt neck blockhead of older adaptations makes the charm of Del Toro’s.
The way he zooms out from the monster and examines the motivations and the darkness within of his creator creates a sweeping sense of scope that makes the movie more dynamic and exciting than it should be. Guillermo Del Toro is good at this. It doesn’t even feel like the same story at all. He’s gotten carried away with the voice modulation for Jacob Elordi, but the young actor manages to make Frankenstein not feel quite sexy even if he was clearly hired for that purpose. He’s both repulsive and attractive at once.
This lively contradiction tones down a lot of the clumsier aspects of Frankenstein.
*
I can’t say Frankenstein was a positive nor a negative experience. It felt adequate at telling a story almost every adaptation prior failed to and that’s something it has going for itself, but Guillermo Del Toro is so absurdly obsessed with overaesthetizing the movie to remind you how goth and imaginative he is that it's distracting. I'll happily resume my Guillermo Del Toro moratorium now. If you’re interested in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the questions it raises, watch it. Otherwise, it’s not a necessary viewing.
6.7/10
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