‘Frankenstein’ (2025): Jacob Elordi elevates Guillermo Del Toro’s stilted version

It’s hard not to like Guillermo Del Toro. I’m talking about del Toro the person, not the director. Yes, because each interview and statement seems to reveal an affable man, with a lucid and warm speech, with that hoarse voice of his adorned by the Mexican accent that, in our case, brings the subject closer.

Director Del Toro is more complicated. Without mincing words, the guy is cheesy as hell, which can definitely be an issue for some. He can’t resist a sunset illuminating everything in backlight, much less the weeping and enticing violins on the track.

The point is that this in itself is far from being a problem. He is, after all, a melodrama — and we Latins understand a thing or two about melodrama: it is a system that works solely and exclusively from reiteration. It is not enough for a character to tell us in voiceover that he is about to “cross over into a new world”; he must also pass through a door frame while the camera mirrors his movement, crossing the wall to follow him.

Likewise, it is not enough that Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, in a histrionic and slightly irritating performance) is a blasphemous angel of death. No: the alleys he walks through must also be soaked in blood, as well as his tower. Your gloves should be red and so should the doors of your castle. And his mother, a traumatic memory in his life, must be presented wearing a flowing red veil.

I think this is all great—blame it on Latin blood if you want. Del Toro, who has a fashionista’s eye, delights in the costume and production design of her world. Frankenstein’s tower is a gothic firecracker. Any of the dresses worn here by Mia Goth would leave Fashion Week critics bristling. That’s definitely not del Toro’s problem.

His sin is simply that he is not the most inspired screenwriter. It’s one thing to be obvious, reiterative. It’s another thing to think that, just because his characters express themselves through Victorian pomp, their incessant speeches stop being what they are: mere platitudes.

As their creations are very basic, it is up to the actors to inject some life into the drama. When casting fails, the result is a boring melodrama like “The Scarlet Hill”. “Frankenstein” already starts with an advantage in relation to that first foray into Victorian gothic: Mary Shelley’s philosophical and supernatural sci-fi is a much more interesting story than whatever the nonsense about morbid loves in that first film was.

Unfortunately, the cast of this new production is irregular. Oscar Isaac, we have already said, delves too deeply into histrionics. As Del Toro doesn’t give the slightest space for any sense of fun in the doctor’s madness, the result is bulging eyes and a padded British accent — and that’s it. Mia Goth, poor thing, doesn’t have much to do in the hands of her director, restricted to the role of the pure and loving Elizabeth. All she can do is follow the script’s instructions, which make her a mere conceptual counterpoint to the mad scientist’s morbidity.

Our luck is that Jacob Elordi, the monster and the heart of the film, is phenomenal. Her trembling hands (so slender, so elegant, with the grace of a dancer), her crooked posture, her whispering, cavernous voice — physically, it’s a formidable performance. But Elordi goes further: he manages, who knows how, to sell the entire drama of father and son, creator and creature, which is at the heart of the plot. It’s all in the eyes.

Del Toro, while having bombastic and operatic impulses, allows himself to be carried away by a certain classy pretension that ends up nullifying the show — making it insipid. That has always been your problem. But with Elordi, the Mexican’s melodrama comes to life — as if struck by lightning during a hellish storm.