“I say adapting is like marrying a widow. You can pay respect to the late husband, but on Saturdays, you gotta get it on.” –Guillermo del Toro

This one was a long, long time coming.

If you’ve paid any attention at all to the life and career of Guillermo del Toro, you should already know that he owes a significant chunk of his career to Mary Shelley. Almost everything he’s ever made has some connective tissue with the themes and iconography of “Frankenstein”. GDT is such a slavishly devoted fan of the story that he was always destined to make his own adaptation someday. And he very nearly did a while back, until he made the savvy decision to get out of the Dark Universe while the getting was good.

But now, at long last — after COVID delays, multiple union strikes, and two freaking decades of campaigning to get this movie made — we finally have Frankenstein (2025), GDT’s vision of the foundational gothic horror classic that defined science fiction as we know it. And it certainly looks and feels like a passion project, if nothing else.

Right off the bat, GDT’s signature morality is visible in his treatment of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature, here respectively played by Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. This portrayal goes full force in portraying Victor as an arrogant and unsympathetic dickbag while the Creature is emotionally vulnerable and sympathetic. One character explicitly states that it’s Victor who’s the real monster, though the two admittedly go back and forth.

Oh, and this Victor gets a prosthetic leg. In effect, this means that he has a visible, chronic, physical trauma as a direct result of his experiment with the Creature. A perpetual and inescapable reminder of his own arrogant folly. Neat touch.

Another contributing factor is Victor’s father. Though the elder Frankenstein is dead within the first act, he makes a strong impression as a stern and abusive son of a bitch. (He’s played by Charles Dance, which certainly helps.) Given Victor’s lack of any healthy paternal figure, it’s little wonder Victor himself turned out to be a spectacular failure in parenting his Creature. This generational trauma is most clearly visible in the scene where the Creature is physically abused by Victor in much the same way Victor was physically abused by his own father.

Something else that’s interesting about this portrayal of the Creature is that it leans hard and heavy on the healing factor that makes him pretty much immortal. The film makes a big deal about how the Creature is constantly suffering and unable to die. Thus Victor’s arrogant ambition to conquer death is shown to be a perpetual curse that the Creature has to live with forever. While Victor himself gets to die. Brilliant.

Conversely, we’ve got Christoph Waltz on hand to play an original character. Henrich Harlander is a wealthy arms dealer who agrees to finance Victor’s experiments for his own ulterior motives. Of course, Victor Frankenstein is an independently wealthy baron (Henrich himself makes a point of addressing Victor as “Baron”), so Henrich was invented to solve a problem that was never really there. While it’s always a pleasure to see Waltz eat the scenery, the character sadly doesn’t contribute much of anything new in terms of plot or theme.

Speaking of which, let’s get to our core love triangle. William (Victor’s little brother, here played by Felix Kammerer) has been aged up in this iteration, so he’s closer to Victor’s age. As for Elizabeth (Mia Goth), this iteration is niece to the aforementioned Henrich and fiancee to William. So this iteration of Elizabeth is not Victor’s adoptive sister, but his prospective sister-in-law. And by making this the core love triangle, the characters of William Frankenstein and Henry Clerval have effectively been merged. Clever solutions all around, really.

Unfortunately, for all Mia Goth’s wonderful talent, she gets eaten alive by the production design. Sorry, but there’s nothing she could say or do that’s anywhere near as interesting as what she’s wearing in any given scene. What’s worse, Elizabeth doesn’t really have much in the way of personality or motivation aside from what’s necessary in the moment to make the male characters want her. She’s a Victorian gothic manic pixie dream girl. Goth is doing her best, but the whole movie is working against her.

As with any adaptation, it’s especially telling what the filmmakers cut out or gloss over and what they spend extended time on. For instance, the film pretty much entirely skips over Victor’s academic career, straight to the point where he’s already made a functioning corpse prototype and practically expelled. Thus the book-original Professor Krempe is little more than a Ralph Ineson speaking cameo, while film-original Henrich is present through half the movie. Furthermore, because William Frankenstein is no longer a child and Justine is nowhere in the cast, that whole wrongful execution incident — which comprised the majority of the Creature’s homicidal vendetta in the book — is omitted completely.

The film is more or less split into two halves, with one half focused on Victor’s POV and the second half focused on the Creature’s POV. Victor’s half primarily focuses on his experiments and the process of the Creature’s invention (complete with gnarly prosthetics and body horror), while the Creature’s half is heavily preoccupied with his time looking after a rural family. (Kudos to David Bradley in his portrayal of a kindly old blind man.) Incidentally, this portrayal of the Creature deals heavily with local wildlife — mostly wolves, though there is one notable scene with a deer — that gives him some perspective with regards to predator/prey and human/beast relationships. Beautifully handled.

Here’s the thing: We’ve got a film that digs deep into certain vital parts of the source material while skipping over others entirely. And the movie is two-and-a-half hours long. This definitely smells like an adaptation that GDT wanted to stretch out into miniseries length, but the studio wouldn’t let him do it. (Netflix learning their lesson from Rebel Moon, hopefully.) Yes, it speaks favorably of the film that I wished there was more of it. But when the movie feels crammed and poorly-paced because the story and its teller weren’t given enough room to properly breathe, that’s a rather noticeable problem.

Then again, it’s entirely possible that expanding to miniseries length would’ve resulted in more self-indulgent bloat than we already got. Yes, Guillermo, your guardian angel statue looks beautiful. That doesn’t mean it belongs in the movie.

Frankenstein (2025) was definitely made to be GDT’s own unique and distinct take on the source material, rather than a faithful adaptation of the source text. And it certainly does work on those merits, for better and for worse. Yes, it’s visually astounding, but Oscar Isaac and Christoph Waltz are the only ones who can successfully eat the scenery while everyone else gets eaten by the scenery. Furthermore, it’s clear that GDT’s ambition far exceeded the film’s runtime and/or budget, and there are some glaringly obvious stitches where something got excised or added.

It’s not the greatest or most faithful telling of the story. It’s not even GDT’s all-time masterpiece (for my money, that’s still Pan’s Labyrinth). But the sheer spectacle on display makes it worth a big-screen viewing, with adjusted expectations.