Writer and Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Mary Shelley’s defining novel is about the brutalisation of human innocence and with its gothic flourishes and high drama it is a surprise that it has taken so long for director Guillermo Del Toro to bring his own version to the screen. Screening at BFI London Film Festival 2025, Frankenstein is not always a subtle film but it is an engrossing one, an epic told in two chapters representing the creator and Creature’s stories across 2.5 hours, it is clear who the monsters are and what they deserve. But what del Toro sacrifices in nuance and the need to write the emotions in big capital letters, it more than makes up for in visual spectacle and in the tender portrayal of the newly birthed man desperate for companionship and receiving only disdain.
Reviled by the medical community, Victor Frankenstein’s experiments on human flesh and attempts to reanimate dead limbs cause consternation among his peers. But when a wealthy benefactor with motives of his own provides unlimited funding and a remote location, Frankenstein sets about creating a man. Bought to life during a violent storm, Frankenstein is soon disappointed and disgusted with his work, yet the kindly Creature yearns for the affection of the benefactor’s daughter Elizabeth.
It’s hard not to be moved by Jacob Elourdi’s sensitive performance as the Creature who from the moment of his animation displays a gentle-souled and poetic innocence that is hugely appealing. As Frankenstein treats him as a violation of humanity, referring to the Creature as ‘it’ and chaining him up, the unlearned trust in his maker is charming, especially when shown in contrast to the mutual attraction with Mia Goth’s Elizabeth, underscoring Shelley’s point that kindness is met with kindness, hatred with hatred.
And Del Toro’s biggest achievement is to manage the Creature’s trajectory, the unlearning of his innate goodness, replaced with a cruelty and violence which matches what he sees in the wider world, the human condition in microcosm. The Director fills his film with Christian symbolism, the interplay between science and faith is crucial and not just in the sense that one man plays God, believing he has the right to create and take life, but in the image of crucifixion that replaces the standard scientific table and the appearance of the newly born Creature in loin cloth, a Jesus figure whose purity could save the world but instead the world corrupts him. There is little faith in people in this version of Frankenstein.
Elordi’s performance is the heart of the film but Oscar Issac is a driven and merciless (an important word in this movie) Frankenstein, a man who at first seems admirable but ultimately proves poisonous, alienating everyone around him and callous about the sanctity of life and death his casual treatment of corpses, selecting bodies at hangings and picking them off the battlefields for his composite human. Mia Goth is little insipid as Elizabeth, as nineteenth-century heroines are wont to be, but she is a cipher for another way of living, one the Creature sees and has snatched away.
Visually it is sumptuous, the period scale that only American-funded movies can afford, all heightened by luminously coloured CGI that works beautifully to convey the Victorian streetscapes and architecture although Disneyfies the wolves and rats who appear later. The dialogue may be a bit heavy handed – “You are the monster” Frankenstein is told – but the scale of Del Toro’s adaptation gives life to Mary Shelley’s creations and asks us to meet them with kindness.
Frankenstein is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
