Review: Frankenstein (2025) (Patreon)

I rarely love Guillermo del Toro movies, but I'm always glad when they come out. The man is a cinnamon roll who makes pretty films about how monsters deserve love too. They're not always good, but they're almost always endearing.

Frankenstein is closer to the Crimson Peak end of the GDT spectrum than Pan's Labyrinth. For the first hour or so, I was somewhat exhausted by its sloppy storytelling, its didactic and clumsy dialogue, the way del Toro exchanges the Miltonian power of Shelley's book for a moralistic fable about the dangers of unbridled scientism. Hell, Victor's fear of death is somehow both overemphasized and underexplored. For a while, I was downright exhausted by this film. Then I remembered that del Toro has a Frankenstein room in his house, and I felt better.

So, yes, Victor Frankenstein himself is poorly served by the film (and I'm not sure what Oscar Isaac is trying to do with the character). As usual, del Toro is spending a movie playing with his favorite characters. But sometimes that works quite well. Jacob Elordi creates as fine a rendition of the Creature as has ever appeared on film, and the scenes where Victor nurtures his son are an interesting looking at a burgeoning parental relationship. It's a mess, sure, and the ending is bullshit, but by the time it was over, I was kinda happy to have seen such flavorful and passionate bullshit. Sometimes movies are a goddamn mess, and when they're del Toro's goddamn messes, they're pretty cute.