For two hundred years, the world has insisted the monster’s name is Frankenstein. Guillermo Del Toro’s stunning 2025 film takes that famous literary confusion and flips it, arguing that the public’s mistake is actually the thematic truth. The film convincingly proves the real monster is the creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. This is the one consumed by hubris, rejection, and cold cruelty.
Del Toro delivers a gorgeous, agonizing meditation on parental failure and generational pain. The story is one of a hurt child transforming into a cold, unfeeling creator. Victor’s ego and descent are often tedious, and yet whenever the narrative risks collapsing under his self-pity, the Creature rises and gives the story a pulse and a fragile, aching heartbeat. This subtle resurrection of the narrative keeps the film alive and reminds the viewers that beauty and ruin often share the same rhythm.
The film’s visual approach is magnificent. Del Toro and his team rely on tangible, tactile Gothic craft that eschews weightless CGI. The world he’s created is tactile and feels crushingly real.
The Creature itself is the film’s magnum opus. The physical design is a heartbreaking, vulnerable piece of anatomical patchwork. Forget the cheap theatrics of past versions. This is a stunning example of old-fashioned craftsmanship that makes the Creature feel like a character, not just a special effect. That character is realized by Jacob Elordi, who uses his towering physicality and eloquent, novel-faithful voice to embody profound, heartbreaking empathy. His Creature is never a random agent of chaos. He is a philosophical outsider yearning for basic recognition.
The film truly works because of the brutal, agonizing tension between its two leads. Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein isn’t the romantic genius we sometimes see. He’s a manic and fundamentally broken man. His performance forces you to confront the arrogance of genius, which makes him almost unbearable. Yet Isaac is just good enough that you see the wounded child beneath the facade. This contrast is vital. Victor’s immediate, violent cruelty is the true source of all subsequent horror, not the stitched-together flesh he created.
The film achieves overwhelming emotional depth, but it occasionally struggles with pacing. The sheer focus on lush melodrama sometimes sacrifices momentum. Certain narrative threads feel a little underdeveloped or rushed. But despite these minor stumbles, the film’s central thesis, that the creator is wholly responsible for the destruction he unleashes, is never lost or diluted.
“Frankenstein” lingers because more than just being a story of stitched flesh and Gothic terror, it’s a study of the arrogance that still haunts us today. The film argues that monsters are often made by those who assume godlike control, who manipulate life and systems without accountability. In an era where science, technology, and influence can shape lives on a massive scale, Victor’s cruelty feels alarmingly familiar. The Creature bears the consequences of choices made by someone who refuses to confront their own failures, just as society often suffers under those who act as if rules, ethics, or empathy are optional.
The film understands this is a tragedy of choice, not fate, and reflects Victor’s own bitter wisdom in the novel: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”
In Del Toro’s retelling of a classic, the true horror is in the human, blind to its own reflection. This film is a terrifying mirror held up to anyone tempted to play God without reckoning with the true, crushing cost.