Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is the kind of film that quietly pulls you into its world and holds you there so completely that you forget about time altogether. It runs over two hours, yet it feels like something outside the clock a cinematic trance woven from shadow, texture, color, and emotion. It is not the familiar monster story we grew up seeing in endless adaptations. Del Toro steps into Mary Shelley’s world with reverence but doesn’t kneel to its tropes; he touches it with his sensibility, with his fascination for beings who exist on the margin of humanity, and the result is a retelling that feels intimate, deeply emotional, and unlike any version before it.
From the very first frames, it becomes clear that del Toro is not interested in horror for its spectacle. He is interested in the creature’s internal world so much so that at times, you feel as though you can hear his thoughts vibrating beneath the stitched flesh. This is a monster story told with empathy, with romanticism, with a tenderness that only del Toro can summon without ever weakening the Gothic backbone of the tale. It is romantic, yes, but in the way del Toro defines romance: through longing, loneliness, connection, and the ache of existing in a world that was never designed to accept you.
You feel del Toro’s fingerprints everywhere. His personal school of filmmaking the universe he carries from film to film breathes fully here: the character designs that border on mythic, the blend of the grotesque with the gentle, the melancholy creatures who live between beauty and tragedy, and a visual world that seems carved out of memory rather than imagination. The makeup and prosthetic work give the creature a presence that is both unsettling and heartbreakingly human. The production design turns every location into a chapter of a storybook soaked in candle smoke and cold air. The Gothic aesthetic is so rich and dimensional that even the shadows feel like they carry secrets.
What makes this adaptation stand out is how loyal it feels to the spirit of Shelley’s original text while remaining entirely del Toro. The creature is once again the misunderstood being Shelley envisioned articulate, sensitive, observing the world with childlike vulnerability and a growing awareness of cruelty. But del Toro adds his own eternal fascination: the gentleness of beings the world insists on calling monsters. It’s a fusion that honors the novel while reimagining its emotional core.
Del Toro also makes a bold narrative choice by splitting the film into two lived experiences. The first half belongs to Victor Frankenstein his obsessions, his brilliance, his impulses, his contradictions. The second half belongs to the creature, walking through the world for the first time, discovering life with a fragmented consciousness stitched together from borrowed bodies and unclaimed emotions. This dual perspective enriches the film. You are not just following a story; you are inhabiting two different souls, each carrying a weight the other created.
Oscar Isaac delivers one of his most commanding performances as Victor Frankenstein. He moves through the film like a storm that can’t decide whether to destroy everything or save it. His portrayal is layered, shifting quickly from love to ambition, from tenderness to prejudice, from curiosity to resentment. These emotional waves hit constantly sometimes one after another, sometimes all at once and Isaac makes each of them feel earned. His Victor is not reduced to a villain or a tragic genius; he is a man torn apart by the parts of himself he refuses to acknowledge.
Jacob Elordi’s turn as the creature is equally striking, perhaps even more. The performance feels studied not in an academic sense, but in the way a dancer studies movement or a mime studies silence. His posture, his reflexes, his pace, the way emotions flicker across his face even when his mouth does not move it all creates a creature who is physically imposing yet emotionally transparent. The voice he gives the monster completes the transformation. Elordi doesn’t just play the creature; he resurrects him. And the impression lingers long after the final frame fades.
Christoph Waltz appears with his usual authority, the kind of presence that immediately sharpens any scene he is in. Yet the film doesn’t give him enough ground to stand on. His character feels underexplored, his potential impact muted, his arc left with unanswered questions. You can’t help but wonder why he was placed in the story if not to shape it more decisively. Still, Waltz remains a pleasure to watch he always does even when the film doesn’t fully use what he brings.
Mia Goth, a performer known for anchoring every role she touches, finds herself in a character that does not allow her full range. It’s not a shortcoming of her as an actress far from it. It’s simply the way Elizabeth is written here: a figure who moves relationships from one stage to another, a catalyst rather than a fully realized force. She plays the part with sincerity and subtlety, but the narrative never gives her the space her talent deserves.
Through all its performances and aesthetic strengths, Frankenstein emerges as the most faithful emotional tribute to Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. It understands the novel’s soul the horror of creation, the loneliness of existence, the grief of being misunderstood, the fragile border between humanity and monstrosity. Del Toro doesn’t modernize it for the sake of relevance; he preserves its essence and lets his own sensibilities sharpen it.
The film is poetic in ways that sneak up on you. Visually, it is breathtaking. Narratively, it moves with a rhythm that feels like following footprints through snow quiet, steady, increasingly urgent. Del Toro guides you through journey after journey, emotion after emotion, until suddenly you reach the film’s end and realize you are not ready to leave yet. You feel as though the story has just begun at the very moment it concludes. That is the magic of del Toro: he doesn’t simply tell you a tale he envelopes you in a world, suspends you inside it, and then releases you before you’re prepared.
It is the finest Frankenstein film to date, and the one that finally seems to understand why this story has endured for two centuries. Del Toro doesn’t rebuild the monster. He resurrects the tragedy, the poetry, the humanity and invites us, once again, to question who the real monster ever was.