About 20 minutes into Guillermo del Toro’s "Frankenstein," we find ourselves in what seems to be an underground cistern, with the larger-than-life and chained Creature playing innocently with the water and looking lost. I have a flashback: in my head, I search the archive of moving images and land upon "The Shape of Water" and belatedly remember that it was again del Toro who wanted us to sympathize with an oversized male baby. And then, when the stunningly dressed Mia Goth as Elizabeth approaches him with nothing short of undying love, "the woman in love with ugly thing" theme from "The Shape of Water" is, to my dismay, complete. I feel it my duty to disabuse men of the notion that women like ugly men. The hard truth is women actually like beautiful men, though del Toro seems to have devoted his career to making you believe this is not so.
However, the "women love ugly men" theme is the least of my worries about this production. From the beginning of the film del Toro cannot put a foot right. It is true crimes have been committed against Mary Shelley’s text through the decades and one consolation here is that del Toro does not advertise itself "Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein" like Kenneth Branagh did in 1994. Branagh had also taken liberties with the text, but not quite as liberally as del Toro.
The first thing that sets me on the wrong foot is the strange setting of the Frankenstein home, which looks French and/or continental, but we are to understand that we are in an English-speaking place, with no less than Charles Dance playing Frankenstein-pere. The house they live in is extremely over the top, with a troop of Napoleon-hatted men following Frankenstein’s father wherever he may move to in their spacious mansion and garden. Dance is typecast here as the unfeeling patriarch and the color and the choreography of the scenes suggest we are in a comic book, a pastiche, or some kind of panto and are not supposed to take things too seriously. This is the tone in the 2025 "Dracula" as well, but at least there, Luc Besson follows the mood through. Here, we are invited to regard this as some pastiche comic book, but also take Viktor, the Creature and Elizabeth seriously when they make grand statements about art, love and beauty.
As in Branagh’s version, del Toro makes much of Viktor’s mother’s death (which is not the case in the text) and as if this weren’t enough, he adds a note of sibling rivalry (which is definitely not in the text), with Viktor feeling jealous of his father’s love for his brother William. We see Viktor grow up to be an intelligent and spiteful man, and one of the notes that felt very false was when he challenged "academia" for their skepticism about eternal life. The point in the novel is that Viktor is challenging God, in the film, he has been downgraded to challenging a few old men in funny scholars’ wigs.
Ladies’ darling, he may well be, but Del Toro must have thought Oscar Isaac did not cut enough of a Gothic figure, so he has enlisted Christoph Waltz, Hollywood’s go-to man for "strange accents" (he plays the Van Helsing character in the Besson "Dracula") for his film. The need for Waltz and his touch of "sinister European vibes" must have been so bad that del Toro has written a whole new part of him, an arms manufacturer who is interested in eternal life and who provides Viktor with the funds and the gothic castle where he must carry out his experiments. This, I am guessing, is a reference to our own age’s designated baddies, and for those critics, who, like myself, will be asking ‘Why are you making Frankenstein again in 2025?’
In a new trend I have noticed in 2025, with adaptations of classic texts, characters are shuffled about and conflated. In the film, Elizabeth seems to have recently left a nunnery – this is not in keeping with the novel but character-wise consistent – to get married to Viktor’s much more docile-looking and blond brother. This must be the first version of the story where the brothers are so close in age. Of course, Mia Goth brings magic to any character she inhabits – and here she represents a woman with "ideas," a much more emotionally intelligent being than the men surrounding her. We are given scenes in which she inspects Viktor’s experiments with the body, the camera angles and choreography telling us that she surely would have made a much better scientist had she been given the opportunity to pursue higher education- the message being hammered into the viewer.
And then comes the film’s most perverse sin. Viktor hooks up the electricity into the dormant Creature’s lymphatic system, and the next morning, the Creature comes to wake up his dad, and Viktor is ecstatic to see his baby alive. This is against all the main tenets of the novel. Shelley’s work is one long discussion about the horror of birth and postpartum depression. In the novel the moment Viktor sees the Creature he is horrified: although he has chosen the most perfect limbs for the Creature the total just does not add up. This scene is actually one of the most well-known moments of the uncanny, where things that ought to be familiar feel strange and abhorrent. In the film what Viktor experiences is not this uncanny but a feeling of frustration that the Creature is not learning fast enough. In the novel Viktor leaves the Creature because he is disgusted by it, in the film he actively tries to kill him although the Creature has not done anything evil yet.
The Creature’s education in nature is one of the most moving parts in the novel and del Toro makes a go of it in a short scene with a deer. The Creature’s adventures with a family of villagers is also scrambled here. In the novel, it is watching the son and the son’s fiancee that gives the Creature a yearning for companionship, and that is why he asks Viktor to make him a mate. When the Creature surprises Viktor at his brother's and Elizabeth’s wedding, Viktor assumes that the Creature has been killing people and is in an attempt to kill him. The scene is so badly managed that from any angle, it is obvious that the bullet is going to hit the Creature and not Elizabeth.
The best way to treat del Toro’s "Frankenstein" would be as fan art, which uses figures from a much-loved book and elaborates on them, adding more and more veneer. The visuals are "stunning" in the way that a high school kid adds glitter on the picture of their favourite star they have just drawn. The most dazzling piece of glitter del Toro adds for the Creature is immortality, his body parts regenerating after any kind of injury. The last sequence of "Frankenstein" can rival any scene from the Marvel universe, with the Creature holding a dynamite bar and telling Viktor to run.
And of course, because contemporary audiences must not be left with difficult emotions in the end, del Toro’s "Frankenstein" closes with a scene of absolution, and the Creature being recognized as human by his fellow men, and him helping them in turn. In short, in giving the Creature this new lease of life, del Toro has smothered Shelley’s classical tale about what it means to be human.
