BFI London Film Festival 2025 | Movie Review: “Frankenstein” Is a Patchwork of Brilliance and Blemishes
7/12 ForReel Score | 3/5 Stars
Frankenstein is the film that Guillermo Del Toro has been trying to make for his entire career. Themes from Mary Shelley’s novel have long coursed through his work - the humanisation of monsters, the peril of playing God, the longing for connection - and now after years of gestation, his own adaptation has finally come to life. Sadly, despite being the foundation for much of his later brilliance, it falls short of the works it inspired.
Image courtesy of Netflix
The design of Frankenstein’s monster simply isn’t convincing. It looks cheap, and more critically, it looks like a costume. The design feels strangely dry, which only adds to its artificiality. It never feels organic. It’s especially devastating considering how brilliantly real and immersive the costuming has felt in Del Toro’s previous attempts. The creature in The Shape of Water moves and breathes in fantastic harmony with Doug Jones’s performance, while the sheer horror of the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth works precisely because of its tactile design. It’s a grave misstep that the film never quite recovers from. The performance that Elordi gives underneath the artifice is solid, and he commits to the devastated bit with an unruly sadness, his enormous body and long limbs being utilised brilliantly to communicate just how eternally agonising it is for the monster to move through the world. But it never quite coalesces into something truly affecting.
Oscar Isaac and Mia Goth both turn in capable performances, but it’s not career-best work for either of them. Goth’s ethereal intensity makes her a fitting presence in del Toro’s universe, but hopefully he writes her a juicier role to sink her teeth into in the future - something with more bite, because we know how capable she is when fully unleashed. The role of wistful love interest pales in comparison to her unhinged brilliance in Pearl or Infinity Pool.
The other aspect in which Frankenstein falls short is simply the look of it. Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water both look utterly sublime, every frame constructed beautifully like a painting. The same can’t be said for Frankenstein. There are flashes of brilliance, and those flashes are beautiful, but for every transcendent shot of the beast traversing the arctic fields as the orange sun burns behind him, we get a clumsy depiction of badly rendered CGI wolves or video game-like bodies being thrown by the beast. The most damning criticism that can be said is that it all looks a bit Netflix.
It’s clear that Del Toro needed to get this adaptation out of his system, an idea that had to be exorcised before he could move forward. It isn’t a failure, and there are flashes of what makes him such a singular filmmaker. But the greatest value of this film’s existence is that it clears the path for del Toro to return to his own stories, where his imagination thrives and his filmmaking feels most alive.