Movie Review: Frankenstein
It’s rare these days to find a Netflix film that’s actually good and a story crafted with care, purpose, and vision. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) is exactly that: a haunting, beautiful, and faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel that reminds us what true filmmaking looks like.
From the first shot, the film’s visuals commands attention. The cinematography is breathtaking with every frame feeling like a painting. Mist-shrouded mountains, flickering candlelight on worn stone, the desolate Arctic wastes, it’s all shot with an artist’s eye. Del Toro’s trademark love for gothic imagery and practical effects is on full display, blending the macabre with the poetic. This is a world you can almost reach out and touch, the kind of immersive atmosphere that too many modern films forget to create.
Oscar Isaac delivers one of his finest performances as Victor Frankenstein. He captures the scientist’s ambition, guilt, and grief with remarkable depth. His Victor is not a mad genius caricature but a man consumed by loss and blinded by his obsession to defy nature. Isaac’s intensity holds the screen; you believe in his brilliance, and you feel the slow unravelling of his soul. For me it’s a career-defining role, and one that elevates the entire film.
Opposite him, Jacob Elordi gives unexpected tenderness to the Creature. Rather than portraying a mindless monster, Elordi presents a being who is both terrifying and tragic and plays the childlike soul trapped in a form the world cannot love. The scenes between Victor and his creation carry real emotional weight, grounding the film in the same moral complexity that made Shelley’s novel timeless. The question of who truly is the monster- the creator or the creation is explored with honesty and restraint.
What’s perhaps most refreshing about Frankenstein (2025) is its sincerity. There’s no forced modern agenda, no heavy-handed “message” trying to hijack the story. Del Toro simply tells it as it was meant to be told: a deeply human tale about creation, responsibility, and the cost of ambition. It trusts the audience to think, to feel, and to interpret which is something that feels almost revolutionary in today’s landscape of surface-level storytelling.
The pacing may test impatient viewers, but those willing to let it unfold will find a richly layered experience. The slow build allows moments to breathe, the quiet horror of Victor’s experiments, the heartbreak of the creature’s loneliness, the beauty of a doomed man’s final redemption. It’s a film that lingers with you long after the credits roll.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein stands as a reminder that classic stories endure not because they’re reinvented beyond recognition, but because great storytellers know how to breathe life into them anew. For indie creators and writers, there’s a lesson here: audiences still crave authenticity, emotion, and vision over gimmicks.
In a world where many modern adaptations stumble under the weight of spectacle or ideology, Frankenstein (2025) succeeds by being what so few films are anymore, it’s honest, beautiful, and profoundly human. A true triumph of storytelling.
