Frankenstein (2025)

These two doomed brides...

To make another Frankenstein movie, you have to bring something new to the story.

You have to tell the audience, this is why I am making this movie, again.

Visually splendid, teeming with melodramatic sentiment, and occasionally soaked in extra gore (a Guillermo del Toro specialty), this Frankenstein plays to all of del Toro's strengths, even if every aspect isn't an innovation.

This Frankenstein belongs to the Creature. Jacob Elordi is great as the Thing brought back from death who discovers, the hard way, that life has no meaning without death, and you know you have a heart because you can feel it breaking. I found this sentiment expressed best when a character is expiring, and Dr Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) cradles the victim in his arms "I can save you!" he cries. "Save me from what?" the victim replies. Young Victor Frankenstein develops this obsession with denying death through a pretty rote "my Dad was mean and my Mummy died" tale.

I found the extended sequence of the Creature making his first friend, with the blind man (David Bradley, Mr Filch from the Harry Potter movies) to be the most affecting section of the movie.

Oscar Isaac acquitted himself well, even if I didn't find anything new in his characterization. Being the mad scientist, he's present for all of del Toro's expressions of bloody anatomy. His red leather gloves were a bit much.

...are just too similar
to each other.

I had little patience for Mia Goth's Elizabeth. The doctor's pure of heart, yet doomed sister-in-law-to-be reminded me way too much of Lily-Rose Depp's doomed bride in last year's Nosferatu.

The turns that don't surprise are the most disappointing. Of course Christoph Walz has a secret. Of course the massive stone tower, repurposed into Frankenstein's lab, has a giant hole in the floor with no railings that someone is going to fall into eventually. Of course the massive drain/chute from the dungeon into the river will provide The Creature with an escape route.

One last note: the framing device - Frankenstein, then the Creature, telling the entire story in flashback to a Danish sea captain whose ship is stuck in the Arctic ice - is a nod to the novel, but is it necessary to give the captain his own emotional arc in a 2½ hour movie?

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, Elordi made it worth watching, I just wish the script surprised me more, instead of living up to my expectations.