Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025)

Hail, Mary

(Warning: plot twists and story discussed in full and explicit detail!)

If you don't know anything about Guillermo del Toro's

Frankenstein (2025) know this: he spent eighteen years sketching, researching, talking, all-around wheeling and dealing with talents and studios to make this, his Great White Whale film adaptation of what he calls his 'favorite novel in the world.' So if he changed anything in Mary Shelley's book while making this picture-- know that he did so out of love. 

Is the film worth a look? Well let me tell you.

A lot to admire here. The production design includes a sarcophagus straight out of David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future and a laboratory that combines the 1931 stone castle tower where the good doctor did his work with the high gothic mansion in del Toro's own Crimson Peak. The creature itself is a radical reinterpretation of Mary Shelley's-- part Berni Wrightson, part Elric of Melnibone, part Jacob Elordi, all del Toro. 

There are script changes, many of which I actually liked: Charles Dance plays Victor's father as a monster disciplinarian (in the book he's largely sidelined). Mia Goth is both Victor's much-loved mother and prospective sister-in-law (his fiancee in the novel) Elizabeth, retooled to be fiercer sexier and if anything even weirder than the doctor himself. 

Not sure I approve of having Elizabeth demoted to sister-in-law though; muddies Victor's motive to hunt down his creation (changing the reason for Elizabeth's demise-- from malevolent tactic to careless shooting accident-- doesn't help either).

Del Toro was always a fabulist and here he pushes fabulism to its limits: sumptuous sunset lighting, extravagantly detailed sets, inventive special effects: he doesn't even skimp on the costumes, many of which are long-sleeved and high-necked, with more textures than a draper's fabric sampler. His best effects are rooted in the old-school horror filmmaker in him, in half-dissected corpses-- a man and his arm bristling with electrodes, a body with spinal cord splayed, to better expose the muscle being stimulated. 

Not as big a fan of the CGI effects, which seem to encroach and ruin any enjoyment of what physical effects are there: weather, impossible landscapes, enhancement to physical structures (the mast and sails of an otherwise solid ship for example)-- it all tends to look overlit and frankly flat, the better to accommodate digital stuff (and, I suspect, less discriminating eyes viewing this on Netflix) 

I can partly sympathize with del Toro's idea of inserting the character of Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), war profiteer and harvester of human bodies, to allow Frankenstein's creature to be both funded and formed from the fleshy output of the Crimean War-- a direct consequence of the military-industrial complex, with Harlander representing both patron and plunderer of Frankenstein's efforts.

What I can't abide is del Toro's whitewashing the creature-- and I don't mean skin complexion. Del Toro and Shelley begin from the same place, with the creature as pure innocence; but Shelley seems to have the warier more adult eye of the two, even if she was only eighteen when she conceived the story (nineteen when she finished writing). She knows the creature may be born sinless but the world can and will corrupt him; she knows her creature to be capable of all emotions, not just love and passion and kindness but resentment, bitterness, cruelty, hate. When Shelley's creature begins a campaign of tormenting his creator he does so by picking off family members one by one including, unforgivably, a young woman and a seven-year-old child (in the film the 'child' is in his late twenties). The creature has learned sadness, loss, suffering, now he wants to pay his pater tormenter in kind, with considerable interest.

Del Toro's creature isn't like that; he's an innocent and stays innocent, killing only in self-defense, being relentlessly sweet, a Romance hero of the Byronic kind-- actually less than Byronic, as the word describes a dark dangerous figure. Del Toro seems to want to rehabilitate Shelley's creature, purge it of its sins; any flaw in its creation is to be directly blamed on Harlander's last-minute interference with one of Victor's steampunk lightning rods.

The ending is an orgy of last-minute father-son bonding and forgiveness, a moment more gruesome than all the mutilated corpses preceding. As for the creature's fate-- arguably del Toro's most audacious conceit is to marry Frankenstein's story with vampire lore, drawing from elements used in Blade 2 and The Strain-- now the creature isn't just inhumanly fast and unnervingly strong he's impossible to kill, immortal without the need to feed on human blood. He's cursed as many del Toro heroes are cursed-- a Pinocchio or a Blade or Hellboy or an Amphibian Man-- doomed to wander the Earth hunted and misunderstood, doing good because his heart says he must.

Not quite what I hoped. Shelley's novel draws from deep within herself, from a mother who lost a child before birthing an immortal tale, her book is full of high feelings and dark thoughts, and the sense of things gone beyond any one man's ability to repair them. Del Toro gives you the sense that nothing can't be fixed by a good sit-down talk and a big hug in the end.  

Elordi is a gorgeous creature no doubt but I so much prefer Shelley's, with its mix of the noble and grotesque: "His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips." Del Toro as with most modern designers like a consistent design; Shelley knew the value of setting a disparate detail beside the other, one mocking the other. 

Might point out that del Toro may have consciously or unconsciously so admired Shelley's book he felt he couldn't reach her level and decided he had to sabotage his own efforts, set alternate goals-- like showing the perils of techbro patronage, the waste wrought by sexism, the possibility of redeeming irredeemably broken relationships. Del Toro might have so loved the creature-- his career is all about the monster as hero-- that he wanted to redeem the creature, have him forgive as well as be forgiven. One wants to salute del Toro's humility; one also wonders if perhaps he'd blown his one best chance at shooting his ultimate wad. 

Too long didn't read: basically I admired del Toro's picture when it was at its ugliest, felt remorse when it was at its most cosmetically beautiful. 

But this is my first viewing; the film, arguably del Toro's most personal, is a repulsively stitched-together assembly of wildly incompatible parts-- much come to think of it, like Shelley's creature. Over time the stitching might heal, with textured skin grown over the glossy patches; over time I might better appreciate this clearly beloved effort, and see it for what it is: an ugly duckling dreaming of becoming a swan. Maybe, who knows? Stranger things have happened.