Written and Directed by Guillermo del Toro, adapting the novel by Mary Shelley | 149 min | ▲▲▲ | Netflix

An earlier version of this review appeared on FITI during the Toronto International Film Festival 2025.

Guillermo del Toro has said this is the film he’s always wanted to make, an epic, two-and-half-hour adaptation of the Mary Shelley classic novel of gothic horror. I’ll admit, my expectations were high. Maybe too high.

This could be del Toro’s most beautiful film. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen brings a gorgeously lit steampunk Victorian fantasy, the masterful production design making every shot a wonder. The wildly ornate costumes, the use of the colour red — as prominent as it was in Crimson Peak — and every set so stuffed with detail you wish we could hold on these scenes and look into every corner. (You could do that when it arrives on Netflix.) But that’s maybe the kindest thing I have to say about it — this is a movie that feels overstuffed, as if del Toro was given the biggest canvas of his life and he went for it, but in an effort to make something essential important elements were missed.

Frankenstein is famously about how the technology we create will destroy us, and about the sin of pursuing immortality. In del Toro’s vision it’s also a romantic tale of fathers and sons, not such a huge departure thematically from his recent, remarkable animated film, Pinocchio. Oscar Isaac is a forceful Victor Frankenstein, someone who was physically and emotionally abused by his father (ubiquitous posh villain, Charles Dance) and so when he finally has success creating an offspring he’s entirely unprepared for the responsibility of being a father.

The fidelity to the novel has us spend some time in the far north — a Danish sailing ship trapped in the ice, manned by actual Danes speaking Danish (including Lars Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas). Jacob Elordi is especially good as the monster, offering maybe his most soulful performance yet and the real heart of the film. It’s good to see stellar support from Christoph Waltz, Burn Gorman, Ralph Ineson, David Bradley, and Felix Kammerer. It’s also shockingly and impressively gory. The scenes of Frankenstein cutting off limbs to assemble his creature is explicit and queasy-making.

But the script doesn’t offer much in the way of electricity through frequent longueurs, especially during an overlong second act. We first get the story from Victor’s perspective, and then we get the Monster’s tale, including his stretch spending a winter with a blind, elderly gentleman (Bradley), who teaches him how to speak and read. After an exciting opening featuring the “birth” of the monster, this segment is stuck in the mud, scuppered by dull and difficult dialogue, and it only somewhat recovers in the finale.

Mia Goth gets the lion’s share of turgid text, which can’t help but impact her performance. The firebrand energy she brought to X and Infinity Pool is entirely absent in this film. Here she plays someone with a good heart who falls victim to Victor’s rage and is drawn in by the monster’s inner gentleness. It’s also such a shame to see some truly substandard CGI of wild animals when so much else in the film looks so glorious.

Finally, why would del Toro choose to make the monster a 19th Century Terminator? His invulnerability becomes less a cautionary tale on the dangers of wishing for eternal life — since it also comes with eternal suffering — and more a deep reduction in the sense of jeopardy for the character we’re supposed to grow to love for his vulnerability, his humanity.

It gives me no pleasure to suggest del Toro’s magnum opus is deeply flawed, but here we are. This enormous creature has strengths, but plenty of weaknesses, too.