"Frankenstein" (2025): review

Mia Goth as Elizabeth and Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, next to a body missing an important part of its face

Tell me if you've heard this one before: Oscar Isaac stars in a movie where he plays an arrogant genius who creates an intelligence that escapes his control. Are you thinking of 2014's "Ex Machina," which arguably introduced the world to Oscar Isaac (many will contend that his breakout occurred two years earlier in "Inside Llewyn Davis")? Well, have I got a surprise for you, then! Isaac reprises the Frankenstein role to star in this year's Gothic story "Frankenstein," directed by Guillermo del Toro.

The DNA of "Ex Machina," like with all stories about intelligent or "ensouled" creations that escape their creators' control—from "The Terminator" to "Battlestar Galactica"—goes back to Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, whose oddly punctuated title is Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. You may recall, from Greek mythology, how Prometheus, a Titan who had created mankind, stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. From this, humanity was able to harness fire, using it for light, warmth, and the building of technology. The gods—particularly Zeus—displeased that Prometheus had tricked them into giving his creations such an existential leg up, chained Prometheus to a rock and let an eagle, named Aetos Kaukasios, or Aëtos, or Aquila, rip out and eat Prometheus' liver, which would regenerate and be eaten again the next day and for all eternity. So any human in the Prometheus role in a story about the creation of sapient life will, we can be certain, not come to a good end.

After Shelley's novel, there have been countless versions of the Frankenstein story brought to film, with countless versions of the monster as played by everyone from Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff to Christopher Lee, Peter Boyle, and Robert De Niro. Frankenstein is, of course, the name of the doctor/creator, not the monster, who is, in the novel, simply "the fiend" or "the wretch" or "the Creature." (These days, many folks confuse the two—creator and creation—but apparently, this confusion began not long after Shelley's story had been published.) Guillermo del Toro's 2025 "Frankenstein" stars Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth (in two roles), Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, David Bradley, Charles Dance, and Lars Mikkelsen. The movie is generally faithful to the novel, with a few major and minor changes in details (e.g., who marries whom and, at the end, who is chasing whom in the arctic north).

Per Shelley's novel, the story of del Toro's film is a framing narrative, with flashbacks to the actual events, leading up to the film's present time. The movie is divided into sections: the prelude, Victor's story, the Creature's story, and the finale. Prelude: As the movie begins, Victor (Isaac) is found by an icebound Royal Danish Navy ship called the Horisont; its captain, Anderson (Mikkelsen), takes the injured and dying Victor in while his men outside see the Creature (Elordi) and try in vain to deal with it. But the Creature, a giant, proves too strong, and the captain eventually has to use a blunderbuss to break the ice beneath the Creature, which has been demanding that Victor be brought to him, sending it beneath the waves. Interested in Victor's story, the captain and ship's doctor do what they can to keep the scientist warm and comfortable while he tells his tale of woe. 

Victor's story: Victor, member of a rich family and the son of a prominent but cold doctor (Dance), grows up learning about anatomy from his father. When his mother (Goth) dies after giving birth to Victor's brother William (Kammerer), Victor vows to conquer death. Given his reckless unconcern for ethics, Victor is ejected from scientific society, the members of whom see Victor's work on the galvanic reanimation of corpses as an abomination. He secures funding from Henrich Harlander (Waltz), an arms manufacturer with nearly unlimited resources, to continue his research into the resuscitation of cadavers, also negotiating with executioners for the bodies of recently killed men. Initially unbeknownst to Frankenstein, Harlander is afflicted with late-stage syphilis—a highly infectious, sexually transmitted disease ("one night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury")—hence his interest in Frankenstein's work as a way to preserve his own life. Harlander is the uncle of young Elizabeth (also Goth), who is betrothed to William, but who has a kind of flirtatious intellectual curiosity about older brother Victor. Victor senses this, too, and wishes to reciprocate, but as time goes on, Elizabeth begins to realize Victor has an enormous ego and an equally enormous dark side. When Victor finally succeeds in assembling and animating a disproportionately huge body composed of several dead men, Elizabeth discovers the Creature chained in a basement room of the castle that Victor, William, and Harlander have converted into an ambitious laboratory. Elizabeth takes pity on the creature, who is fearful after being mistreated and demeaned by Victor (who fears and despises his creation). Eventually, Victor decides to destroy the work of his hands. After refusing to create another creature for the sake of Harlander, who had wanted his consciousness transferred to it, Harlander dies in a fall, and his brain is smashed into uselessness. Elizabeth and William, about to be married, sense trouble and return in time to see Victor burning down the castle and all of his work. The Creature, meanwhile, has contrived to escape, plunging off the nearby cliff and into the ocean. Victor, trying to save the Creature in a fit of remorse, loses a leg in one of the explosions shaking the castle and is taken by William and Elizabeth back to their home, where he convalesces while they finalize their wedding preparation.

In the present, the Creature fights its way aboard the Danish ship, finds Victor aboard, and tells its own tale ("The Creature's Story"). Escaping the castle where it was created and knowing no words aside from "Victor" and "Elizabeth," the Creature wanders until it finds the farm of a multigenerational family: hunters, a wife, a daughter, and an old grandfather (Bradley, a.k.a. irascible Argus Filch in the Harry Potter movies and irascible Walder Frey in "Game of Thrones") who is also blind. The Creature, always in hiding, begins performing menial tasks to help the family, who credit the Spirit of the Forest as their benefactor. As the Creature listens to family conversations, it begins to learn language and concepts, developing a sense of human interaction and conflict. Having been hunted by the family's young hunters, it already understands that it is shunned by most of humanity, but when the family leaves the blind grandfather alone for the winter, the Creature gains the courage to show itself. The grandfather, kindly, befriends the Creature, and together, they plow through the grandfather's limited library of books, allowing the Creature to gain something of an education. A pack of wolves comes to the home while the Creature is away making discoveries about his past; the Creature is too late to save the grandfather from a mauling, but the grandfather declares the Creature to be his friend before dying. Having returned to the castle of its creation, where it discovered Frankenstein's paperwork, the Creature now knows its horrible origins, and it grimly resolves to find Victor, who is convalescing with William and Elizabeth, to demand that Frankenstein create it a female companion. The monster bursts into William's home; Victor tries to shoot the monster, but Elizabeth steps in the way and is gutshot. She dies, but not before telling the Creature that her greatest fulfillment in life was meeting it—him. Enraged, the Victor initially pursues the Creature—they later switch roles—in what will become a long chase leading into the bleak north, bringing us back to the beginning of the movie.

Shelley's novel ends with Frankenstein dying aboard the ship while the Creature promises the ship's captain that he, the Creature, will burn himself to death, after which he leaves the ship and disappears. The movie ends, shall we say, somewhat differently. In fact, there's a long scene with Viktor in bed and the Creature leaning over him, hand on Victor's chest as if getting ready to crush the life out of Victor with a single, sternum-cracking shove, perhaps as a loving mercy killing or as a final act of rage. The suspense of whether the Creature would go through with this murder carried me through the scene.

Del Toro was apparently delighted to work on this story, which sources say he considered a "dream project." The movie certainly contains many tropes that one would associate with a del Toro work: the beauty found in monstrousness (also a theme for directors like Tim Burton, who would doubtless appreciate this film's visuals), stylized gore, angelic and demonic imagery, etc. Some del Toro tropes were missing, however, including del Toro's beloved Lovecraftian tentacles, a huge trope in his Hellboy movies. Other images, seemingly carried over from previous del Toro films, made it into the final cut, however, the most striking of which is how the Creature, from a certain angle and with certain lighting, is the spitting image of Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) from "Hellboy 2" (a movie I have yet to review, incredibly). A Tim Burton-like theme of misunderstood ugliness hiding potential inner beauty permeates this movie's plot, and an overarching sadness about missed opportunities becomes an ever-thickening dark cloud over the story, resulting in an ambient sadness. Victor Frankenstein, horrified by his creation and still a prisoner of his own ego, treats the Creature terribly, chaining it in what is basically dungeon-like conditions and physically abusing it when it is still mentally feeble and barely able to understand the concept of "Victor." Elizabeth, when she first comes into the dungeon and treats the Creature with kindness, gives the Creature the first hint that not all of humanity is cruel. Later on, the old grandfather shows the Creature the better side of humanity as well. Imagine if Victor had only been kind to the Creature from the beginning. It might still have been rejected by most of humanity, but it would at least have had a father and friend.

I think that, more than the novel ever did, del Toro's film tries to explain how and why the Creature is able to survive damage. It has a Wolverine-like healing factor, an ability to regenerate that is similar to that of Prometheus himself, the Titan whose liver is torn out daily by beak and talons, only to grow back so that the torture can continue the following day. This ability to survive damage—even the explosive force of a stick of dynamite—serves as proof that Victor Frankenstein had, ironically, succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in his efforts to conquer death: the Creature simply cannot die; it can never know the solace, succor, and surcease of death. Mangled and ugly, the Creature cannot live a proper life; it also cannot die a proper death. It is trapped in the hell of its own existence by the knowledge that most of humanity rejects it as a horror and an abomination.

Finale: In the movie, unlike in the Kenneth Branagh-directed film from 1994 (where Branagh was Frankenstein and Robert De Niro was the Creature), the Creature makes no effort to immolate itself. Instead, it performs a final act of kindness for the icebound Danish vessel, using its gargantuan strength to break the ship out of the ice to allow the Danes to sail back home instead of continuing their quest for the North Pole. After this, the Creature turns east and, in a gesture that it had learned from Victor in a moment of rare kindness and humanity, the Creature opens its arms and enjoys the rays of the rising sun—the one thing it has learned to appreciate. As in the novel, the Creature's immediate future is left vague. In Shelley's story, the Creature promises to immolate itself, but in del Toro's movie, the Creature is effectively indestructible, so what future lies before it—and before us—is left a mystery.

Del Toro stresses that the Creature is a figure of pity. It is occasionally driven to murderous rages, but only when attacked. It tends to return kindness with kindness, and its attacks are more like self-defense than revenge. But del Toro's change of one crucial detail throws the movie's ending in disarray for me: in Shelley's story, it's the ever-weakening Victor who pursues the Creature into the cold north. When the movie Victor is taken in by Captain Anderson (Captain Robert Walton in the book), he begs the captain to turn the scientist over to the monster, perhaps as a way to appease it and to spare the lives of the ship's crew. But why would Victor be so ready to sacrifice himself after spending so much time running from his creation? Perhaps this might make sense with a better script, but we're left with little exposition to grasp Victor's apparent change of heart. Why was there even a pursuit into the cold north if Victor had already been willing to let the Creature kill him? This is the one aspect of the movie's plot that bothers me. At least on the surface, it makes no sense. Why not stick to the original story and have Victor pursue the Creature? In terms of detail changes, this may have been the most bizarre.

[NB: A second viewing of the movie shows that my description of how the story begins is accurate: the monster is pursuing and calling for Victor. But after Elizabeth is killed, it is indeed Victor who goes in pursuit of the monster. Somewhere along the way, the hunter/hunted roles change, probably at the moment where Victor and his sled dogs are resting in the arctic. Victor sees the monster from a distance and goes into his tent to get his rifle. At this point, the monster seems to have decided to chase Victor. When the monster's hands reach into the tent, Victor shoots, injuring his creation. The Creature circles around to the other side as Victor is rearming himself; the Creature grabs Victor's leg and drags him out of the tent; Victor brings out a stick of dynamite, and the Creature grabs it and challenges Victor to light it after scoffing that the dynamite will not "unmake" him. Victor lights the stick. The monster bids him run; Victor manages to reach a low hill as the dynamite goes off, and the Creature is relatively unhurt while Victor, not quite on the other side of the hill, is blasted into the air and flung far, which brings us back to the beginning, with the Danish crew finding Victor on the ice. But my confusion remains: who, ultimately, was chasing whom, and why did Victor finally acquiesce to being given over to the Creature?]

On the brighter side, even though del Toro's film overlaps with Branagh's film in some of its visuals, it lacks Branagh's immoderation and over-the-top sensibilities. Branagh's "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" was, at some moments, unintentionally hilarious in its self-seriousness. The greatest disappointment in that film may have been the reanimation of Elizabeth, which is initially excellently portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter in a nightmarish performance as Elizabeth realizes she ought to be dead but is still alive. What happens next, though, is just awful: filled with self-loathing, Elizabeth lights herself on fire and runs through the castle, setting everything in her path on fire instantly. The CGI effects for this were so poor that I couldn't take Elizabeth's self-immolation seriously. What had started out as a sublimely horrific scene had rapidly turned into comedy. In del Toro's film, by contrast, we see a master at work, and while I might have plot-related questions about how the movie concluded, I could also see that del Toro had complete control over the movie's tone, and he knew exactly how we, the audience, ought to feel from moment to moment. The movie might not have made complete logical sense, but it made emotional sense.

I can't speak for how period-accurate the film is. Shelley's novel came out in 1818; del Toro's movie is set in the late 1850s; dynamite wasn't invented by Alfred Nobel until two years after the end of the American Civil War (i.e., in 1867). It could be that the dynamite-shaped stick that the Creature uses to try to kill itself was made with black powder and not stabilized nitroglycerin, but the shape of the stick, and its fuse, screamed TNT to me, so this could simply be an anachronism. (Upon a second viewing, I saw that dynamite is mentioned by name, so it's definitely an anachronism.) There's a bit of veiled nudity in the film as women (and one or two male characters) are seen in gowns that are awkwardly backlit, thus revealing, somewhat, their bodies beneath the gowns. How period-accurate was the costume design?

Let's talk a bit about the actors and their acting. The English actress Mia Goth, as Victor's mother, speaks to the young Victor (Christian Convery) in French, but even though her accent is clear (as is Convery's), it's obvious she's not a native speaker. Goth also seems to be channeling Shelly Duvall from "The Shining" in some of her scenes; that wide-eyed look of distress feels awfully familiar. The American Oscar Isaac has had practice using a British accent in the work he's done for Disney Marvel's "Moon Knight" series; he puts that skill to good use in the role of Victor Frankenstein, whom he portrays with manic intensity, followed by, at the last, a kind of defeated humility. Charles Dance proves once again that he's the perfect choice to play a cold, stern, distant father (just as he did as Tywin Lannister, "Game of Thrones"). Christoph Waltz, as Henrich Harlander, makes the most of a character—not from the novel—who is little more than a plot device. Alas, the most memorable Harlander scene comes after he's dead of his fall and lying face-up several floors below; Frankenstein rushes down to his body and lifts his head, the back of which has been smashed into sopping mush, Harlander's dreams having been literally crushed. Australian actor Jacob Elordi as the Creature is tall (with the aid of special effects, I'm sure) and ghoulish, but he has to be one of the handsomest versions of the Creature ever to be portrayed on screen. The Creature often looks more like the robotic Nebula from the Marvel movies than a stitched-together amalgam of cadavers. That has, in fact, been one of the major problems in all the portrayals of Frankenstein's monster: how do you make a monster who truly looks to have been assembled from disparate parts? You'd think that modern VFX would be able to handle that task, but I guess not. Nevertheless, whatever the VFX's shortcomings, none of that is Elordi's fault. He plays a Creature that holds within it a brutal potential for violence but also the potential for real goodness and even love. Both Elordi and Isaac could be up for some awards.

In all, I can't say this movie was anything close to perfect, but it may be one of the better offerings in 2025. It kept my attention, explored Crichton-like the consequences of man's compulsion to use science to trump what as been ordained by biology, and except for that bit of confusion at the end about why Victor was even running if he was willing to be killed by the Creature, I'd say that del Toro has crafted a gripping, compelling, sad story that once again showcases a sort of feral ugliness that has the potential for good. The Creature belongs in the same del Toro ugly-not-evil pantheon as Hellboy, Prince Nuada, Abe Sapien, The Amphibian Man, the angel of death, and the god Pan. "Frankenstein" evokes Tim Burton and the old, cinematic classics; it even has something aesthetically in common with Kenneth Branagh's sometimes-ridiculous, overblown, and unintentionally humorous attempt at the classic story. Del Toro's movie is faithful to Shelley's novel in the broad strokes but different enough in the details to make purists uncomfortable. I've heard complaints that the movie's limited theatrical release before going onto Netflix was a mistake; maybe it was. I don't quite understand the politics and economics of movie houses versus streaming movies, but I suspect that, ultimately, streaming is going to win out as fewer people choose to pay exorbitant ticket prices to sit with obnoxious audience members. So watch "Frankenstein" on Netflix while it's still hot. It was, after all, produced by Double Dare You Films.