God bless Netflix money. In common with the similarly vast, similarly monolithic Disney, whatever the complaints and concerns about this level of power and influence may be, there’s at least the comfort that, when they pull in one direction, they can support eminently worthwhile projects – just like Frankenstein, or in Disney’s case, like their recent, excellent Aliens TV spin-off, Aliens: Earth. Guillermo del Toro has been trying and – for various reasons – failing to make his own select version of Frankenstein for years, some of which stems from his own creative reluctance, but also from various creative obstacles to do with things like his Universal collaboration, issues around casting and around scheduling. Finally, after several issues (particularly around casting the Creature) and around eighteen years after Del Toro first expressed his interest in adapting Mary Shelley’s novel, here we are, and the finished product is very good indeed. The clear presence of Netflix money, that evident ‘no expense has been spared’ feel to each and every one of the scenes is very welcome, but more than that, there’s a clear sense of balance here between deference to pre-existing adaptations and a sharp, incisive and individual spin on the source material. Many of the changes to the original story are inspired, though never dispensing with Shelley’s original vision of a man elevated by his own arrogance to play with the forces of life and death, to the destructive detriment of his life and loves.
This review is briefly going to stop talking about Frankenstein and start talking about Dracula before going back to the film at hand. There are reasons for this, and not just that the first filmed scenes from Frankenstein (2025), which showed at a Netflix taster event in September of this year, were first scored to Wojciech Kilar’s Dracula (1992) score. Frankenstein has also been bumped ahead a few decades here too, turning it into a Victorian-era story – again, in common with several high-profile and influential adaptations of both of these seminal horror novels. The aesthetic style of this film is also in so many ways similar to the Coppola take on Dracula that the earlier film frequently pops into mind when watching. The clothes, the sets, the style of the script – all very Dracula (1992), just as painterly and just as Romantic Gothic, something which works just as well when you consider some of Del Toro’s nods to the Hammer film The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), also here in abundance, and not just in the Creature design itself. Something else which seems to correspond not just to the Coppola Dracula, but to however many adaptations of Dracula you’d like to count, is the ways in which key characters from the novel are reshuffled and altered for the film.
Whilst retaining a fairly faithful take on the novel’s framing narrative, Del Toro does something similar to a lot of Dracula films here, shifting the dynamics in the Frankenstein family, with Victor now the alienated, unloved and bereaved elder son and William – who reaches adulthood here – held up as the model son by Frankenstein Sr (Charles Dance). Frankenstein Sr’s determination to coach his elder son into medical brilliance leads him into being a monomaniacal, arrogant and emotionally chilly rabble-rouser, barred from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh for reanimating a corpse (in a sequence, by the by, worthy of Return of the Living Dead). Victor (Oscar Isaac) threatens to slump into a self-pitying fugue state because no one wants to acknowledge the importance of his work, but luckily an interested bystander comes along in the form of Henrich Harlander, a wealthy industrialist who offers him silly money to continue fulfilling his scientific vision. A man with unending wealth, throwing money at someone to help them fulfil a seemingly impossible creative project? Imagine that.
Harlander (Christophe Waltz, who’s also in the brand new Luc Besson Dracula, another Dracula link) is an arms dealer, so he’s particularly unsqueamish about about mass casualties – in fact, his livelihood depends on it, and permits him a ceaseless supply of body parts, which he offers to Frankenstein via the current and ongoing Crimean War in Europe (as well as the more usual array of hanged criminals). He sets Frankenstein up in an abandoned water tower in the middle of nowhere, which clearly comes from an era when people cared about aesthetics in building design, because it could just as easily have been an abandoned medieval keep of some kind. Frankenstein moves in, and his work – now centred on the lymphatic system as the key to conveying energy through the proposed experimental ‘man’ – progresses. But Victor is reliant on his younger brother William (Felix Kammerer) to help him set everything up, and as thanks, he develops an obsession with William’s new fiancée – Harlander’s niece – Elizabeth (Mia Goth).
The work soon reaching its near-conclusion, Victor is horrified to learn that Harlander’s interest in his work turns out to be self-interest: he wants more involvement with the newly-designed Creature, let’s say, than he originally let on. In the chaos of Victor’s key moment, his creative relationship with Harlander gets severed – and the Creature (Jacob Elordi), at first, disappears. But Victor has not failed in his design and soon the Creature comes to find him, acting like a newborn – a newborn which unfit father Frankenstein soon grows bored with, given the Creature’s slow progress at learning language. Boredom quickly becomes cruelty; when William and Elizabeth discover Victor’s work and his mistreatment of the rather beautiful Creature, chained up in the bowels of the tower, they are horrified, the gentle Elizabeth in particular using kindness towards the Creature, not cruelty. But Victor is unassuaged, and tries to end his experiment forever with fire, assuming that his project would burn to death and he could – what? Steal his devoted brother’s wife-to-be? Start over? Not a bit of it: the Creature of course escapes, and key elements of the story then go on to unfold as per the novel, with the Creature learning language, understanding humanity – and requiring more than he’s received from his cruel, and here potentially murderous Creator.
The film’s pretty Gothic has already been mentioned; where Del Toro’s Frankenstein offers up sharp contrast to this is in the brief, but particularly grisly moments of gore it also includes. These feel like a surprise, but they work brilliantly well. Just as Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein (1994) added in its own uncompromising moments of gore (using amniotic fluid in a particularly lavish but unpleasant plot development) so Del Toro peppers his film with body parts; from the disciplinary hearing at the Royal College of Surgeons to the floor in the tower, which ends up literally awash in blood and limbs, there’s no scrimping on the kinds of details which must have been there lurking in Mary Shelley’s imagination, given her descriptions of a protagonist who “dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave”. But there’s another contrast in the Creature himself, who starts life here as a Christopher Lee-esque, shaven-headed creation, but eventually morphs into a brooding, Gothic wanderer, long flowing hair and all: in each incarnation, he is unusually beautiful, clearly envisioned as the Rousseau-era tabula rasa, an innocent newborn who just so happens to be a fully grown curious and essentially (at first) harmless boy; it’s also clear that Frankenstein looked around for just the right set of cheekbones, by the way. Frankenstein’s contemptuous treatment of this harmless being surely establishes Isaac’s Frankenstein as one of the most openly loathsome Frankensteins ever committed to film. He’s just dreadful. That mocking tone he uses as his creation struggles to grapple with vocabulary, or fails to develop at a pace which holds his interest; if anything, this Victor could have suffered a hell of a lot more, and it would have been even more satisfying.
As it stands, the film shifts into the Creature’s own account of his ordeal and the film spends a good deal of its time with him, following him through the ‘spirit of the forest’ sequence (again, grislier than in the novel but just as heart-wrenching) and providing enough of an account for the ways he becomes cruel; it’s clear how and why he understands that his only hope of happiness would come from his deadbeat dad creating another Creature for a companion, but, as in the novel, Victor grows a conscience just in time to deny the Creature this favour, though this new film uses an interesting bridge between the request, the denial and the end of the story. Throughout, Isaac’s jagged arrogance is balanced by Elordi’s sensitive portrayal, which comes across very well despite him being swathed in prosthetics. In another Dracula parallel, his Creature with his modded lymphatic system seemingly can’t die, i.e. like a vampire, despite some serious attempts on his life – by himself and by his maker. Elsewhere, the supporting cast feels much more front-and-centre than perhaps expected, with Waltz doing a great turn as a new character and an interested party, and Mia Goth offering a suitably gentle and humane spin on this film’s rendition of Elizabeth. Despite some misgivings about William Frankenstein making it in this version of the story, it works well because we need to believe that there’s at least one son in the family with his ego in check.
This is a long film – just shy of two and a half hours – but it doesn’t feel padded out and it doesn’t ever feel like it loses its way; this is a good piece of storytelling, and – with apologies for bringing up a version of Dracula one more time – it thrives where Nosferatu (2024) begins to struggle in its own second hour, under the dual burden of the weight of expectation and, worse, a sudden, unexpected shift in tone toward – arguably – camp. Frankenstein never feels like that: it allows its key elements the time and space to flourish, but it stays focused on the tale itself, offering up a sumptuous, assured piece of period Gothic, aware of its place in a long legacy, but equally clear on what it wants to achieve. It’s been a long time in the making but it’s worth the wait, and it’s a genuine pleasure to have Del Toro back at the top of his game here as a live action filmmaker, finally delivering his take on a story which still retains so much potential as a horror-tinged, cautionary tale.
Frankenstein (2025) is available in cinemas now and will release on Netflix from November 7th.