By Mo Moshaty

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein doesn’t reinvent Mary Shelley’s myth so much as reframe it in extreme ennui. With Dan Laustsen (Nightmare Alley) on visuals, every image gleams like a stained-glass window, light fractured through grief. At the heart of this Gothic canvas is Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein, a man animated not only by ambition but by the sorrow of losing his mother Claire (Lauren Collins) and the crushing weight of his father Leopold’s (Charles Dance) endless expectations. His creation, played with startling fragility and physical power by Jacob Elordi, is born not from love but from that grief. And in Del Toro fashion, both man and monster are revealed as unfinished, yearning beings: one carving life from arrogance, the other begging to be seen as more than the sum of his parts…literally.

Victor’s pursuit is all to familiar as far as tortured scientists go: to conquer death, to transcend limitation, to eclipse the father who belittled him. But Isaac lays him bare, a man whose brilliance is inseparable from his need to dominate. His creature, by contrast, arrives like a wound that refuses to close. Elordi’s performance locates the monster’s tragedy in his tenderness: he is desperate for connection, acutely aware that his very existence makes him unworthy in human eyes. The film moves fluidly between their perspectives, revealing creation as a mirror that does not flatter but condemns. Victor’s so-called triumph is simply his reflection staring back, asking who the true monster is.

Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth in Frankenstein (2025) Double Dare You Pictures

Threaded through this duet is his younger, and more favored, brother William’s (Felix Kammerer) fiancee, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), whose tragedy is quieter but no less piercing. For Victor, she is a possession: a possible conquest or perhaps a beautiful extension of his legacy. For the monster, she is compassion, the only figure who meets him with something resembling kindness. Yet Elizabeth’s alignment with the creature is what deepens the film’s sorrow. She, too, lives a half-life, desired but never seen, cherished only in terms of what she provides to others. To William, a intellectual and pretty mate, to her uncle (and Victor’s financier) Herr Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a gentile dowry. Goth plays her with a delicate fury, making Elizabeth less a passive victim than a shadow-twin to the creature. Two beings trapped in roles they did not choose.

Del Toro doesn’t let the visuals simply decorate this story; Laustsen’s cinematography pulls tragedy into every frame. Victor’s laboratory glows with the sterile grandeur of a church, while the creature’s face is sculpted by light to show both terror and innocence. Even Elizabeth is framed as if caught between two worlds, her body half-claimed by shadows that feel more honest than the men who profess to love her. It’s an aesthetic that collapses beauty and sorrow until the viewer can no longer separate them. Truly Gothic in every sense.

Frankenstein belongs in the long lineage of films about creation and possession, from Edward Scissorhands to Ex Machina (does Isaac have trouble with his creations or what??), stories where making a being or shaping a life becomes an act of control that says more about the creator than the creation. Del Toro sharpens that point: Victor and his monster are both tragic inventions, and Elizabeth reveals how creation extends beyond laboratories into relationships, families, and societies that believe they own the people they shape.

The tragedy, of course, is baked in. We know the creature will never be free, and Victor will never see his own monstrosity, so no spoilers there. But Del Toro’s version lingers less on the inevitability of horror than on the fragility of longing. To be seen, to be loved, to belong. In this Frankenstein, the monster is not the only one denied that right.

Frankenstein (2025) will be followed by a limited theatrical release on October 17, 2025 and a global release by Netflix on November 7, 2025