Why Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein exudes more vanity than humanity

Frankenstein (Mexico, United States/2025). Address: Guillermo del Toro. Script: Guillermo del Toro from the novel by Mary Shelley. Photograph: Dan Laustsen. Edition: Evan Schiff. List: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Charles Dance, Lars Mikkelsen. Qualification: Suitable for people over 13 years old. Distributor: Maco Films. Duration: 149 minutes. Our opinion: buena.

Guillermo del Toro’s cinema exhibits its successes, in films such as The devil’s backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy and the Oscar winner The shape of watera unique and perfectly identifiable author’s brand. When the Mexican director’s way of narrating works, the result is usually evocative stories that use fascinating imagery that crosses his Catholic training with his fascination for the darkest Gothic tales. Those fantastical worlds inhabited by beautiful monsters more human than humans brought the director directly to the crudely assembled feet of the creature at the center of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein.

The resulting film – produced by Netflix, which will have it available from November 7 – is included in the list of his most failed films, an experiment that, beyond its good intentions and its confirmed visual talent, staggers under the weight of its aesthetic excesses and a handful of poor dramatic decisions.

A self-confessed fan of the gothic horror tale, Del Toro took it upon himself to create his own version of the narrative, so often adapted to film that most viewers know, roughly speaking, what it is about. He challenge of retelling the story from an original point of view but maintaining its essence in the face of the expectation that inevitably generates the decision that the film, in its original version in English, be presented from the title as the Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro, perhaps it was too ambitious for the director.

In search of narrating the descent into madness of the scientist obsessed with creating life from death, of playing God and becoming the modern Prometheus that Shelley included in the title and content of his novel, the Mexican director ended up turning his film into a creature made of discards, of references from his work and his great visual successes that at times seems to serve no other reason than his own vanity.

Dan Laustsen, the director of photography with whom he usually works, constructs shots of a beauty that shocks and becomes horrifying at the right moments. The art direction is on point, helping to create a Victorian universe with details of sacred art imagery that often sneaks into Del Toro’s films. These aesthetic wonders constitute the highest points of the film that imagines its doctor Frankenstein as a petulant surgeon, who carries childhood traumas that explain in a rather rudimentary way the impulse behind his actions.

To play the rebellious and eccentric surgeon, Oscar Isaac who, armed with a spectacular British accent, possibly presents one of the most overacted performances of his entire career. Thus, the scenes he shares with Cristoph Waltz, a specialist in exaggeration, who plays the scientist’s mysterious financier, become a festival of hyperbolic gestures that bring them dangerously close to ridiculous. Although the intention was to create an operatic effect, what is achieved in certain passages of the film are scenes of artificiality worthy of less successful musical comedies.

To balance these setbacks, the two most interesting characters in the entire plot appear: the Creature (Jacob Elordi) and Elizabeth (Mia Goth). Figures as tragic as they are sensitive, the encounter between the new man created with old parts and the woman of unwavering faith provide glimpses of a humanity that the film desperately needs.