In the annals of cinematic reanimation, where Mary Shelley's bolt-necked behemoth has been stitched together more times than a drunk surgeon's weekend project, Guillermo del Toro's 2025 incarnation of Frankenstein arrives like a polite thunderclap—less a jolt to the jugular, more a sigh from the soul. One might have expected the Mexican maestro, with his penchant for fairy-tale fungi and labyrinthine regrets, to turn Victor's laboratory into a piñata of practical effects and existential ectoplasm. Instead, he delivers a Gothic romance so lush it could make Brontë blush, framed as a deathbed confession to a crew of bemused Arctic sailors in 1857. It's the sort of film that reminds you why we bother with monsters: not to scare the trousers off us, but to hold a mirror to our own lumpy, lightning-scarred hides.
The performances are the sinew that holds this patchwork beast upright, and oh, what a gloriously grotesque menagerie del Toro has assembled. Oscar Isaac, that chameleonic charmer who's played everyone from moonlit revolutionaries to interdimensional obsessives, inhabits Victor Frankenstein with the coiled intensity of a man who's read too much Rousseau and not enough self-help. His Victor is no cackling caricature but a brilliant egotist undone by his own god-complex, his eyes flickering between divine fire and dawning despair like a faulty filament in God's own workshop. Isaac's the rare actor who can make intellectual hubris feel as seductive as a midnight swim, and when he begs forgiveness from his creation in the film's fevered finale, you'll forgive him for the hubris—and yourself for rooting for the wretch.
Then there's Jacob Elordi, the towering Aussie import who's traded Euphoria's teen torments for the Creature's colossal woes, and good lord, does he galvanise the role. At six-foot-five, Elordi doesn't just lumber; he looms with a pathos that turns Shelley's shambling revenant into a heartbroken colossus, his stitched skin a map of mankind's casual cruelties. There's a scene—early on, amid the blind man's humble hearth—where the monster learns language not through grunts and gestures, but through the exquisite agony of unrequited curiosity, and Elordi's face crumples like wet parchment. It's invigorating, as the critics have rightly volted; one half-expects him to burst into a baritone ballad about elective affinities. Mia Goth, as the doomed Elizabeth, provides the necessary frost-kissed foil, her wide-eyed innocence curdling into quiet ferocity without ever tipping into melodrama. The supporting gallery—Charles Dance as the patriarchal tyrant, Christoph Waltz adding Viennese venom—buzzes like a chorus of electrocuted crickets, each bite just sharp enough to draw blood.
But it's Dan Laustsen's cinematography that truly brings the affair into immortality, bathing del Toro's European fever-dream in a palette of bruised twilight and candlelit opulence. Shot on 35mm with an eye for the ecclesiastical grotesque—think Hammer Horror filtered through a Catholic confessional—Laustsen conjures Edinburgh's fog-shrouded spires and Toronto's surrogate salons into a world where shadows don't just creep, they confess. The Arctic framing device gleams like fractured ice, mirroring the Creature's fractured psyche, while the laboratory birth throbs with bioluminescent menace, all without a single overreliance on CGI's cold scalpel. It's the kind of visual poetry that makes you want to applaud the lens itself, a reminder that del Toro's true sorcery lies not in monsters, but in making the mundane monstrously beautiful. If there's a quibble—and in a two-and-a-half-hour epic, there must be—it's the runtime, that 150-minute sprawl which occasionally sags like an over-stitched limb under its own weight. Victor's Arctic yarn unspools with the leisurely gait of a man who's already half-dead, and while the emotional undercurrents demand their due, one can't help wishing del Toro had trimmed a subplot or two before the electrodes fired. It's not bloat, exactly—more a generous indulgence in the myth's marrow—but in an age of TikTok attention spans, it feels like serving foie gras to finches.
Ah, but what a shame, then, that this lumbering leviathan barely lumbered into cinemas at all. With a $120 million budget and a box office tally that wouldn't buy a decent set of grave-robbing tools ($313,641 as of last week), its limited October run—IMAX flirtations notwithstanding—fizzled faster than a damp fuse. One mourns the missed spectacle of Elordi's silhouette blotting out multiplex screens, the collective gasp of strangers at Laustsen's luminous horrors. Yet perhaps it's fitting for a tale of creation and abandonment: Netflix scooped it up for a global binge on November 7th, where it can lurk in your living room like a guilty secret, replayable at will. There, amid the pizza crumbs and paused regrets, del Toro's Frankenstein will find its true resurrection—not in thunderous applause, but in the quiet thrill of a story that sticks to your ribs like original sin.