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A master of gothic gore and heartbreaking creature features, Guillermo del Toro has run the gamut of movie genres. From tales of horror like Crimson Peak to superhero adventures like Hellboy and sci-fi actioners like Pacific Rim, del Toro's films have both dazzled audiences and sent chills down their spines. Whether it's a Spanish Civil War-era ghost story, a beauty-and-the-beast love story, or a stop-motion Pinnochio, there's no mistaking the 60-year-old filmmaker's distinctive cinematic style and unique eye for the macabre. And with his 13th feature, Frankenstein, del Toro is adapting yet another literary classic, as he sets out to breathe new life into Mary Shelley's 1818 classic. The year is 1857, and when the crew of an expedition bound for the North Pole discovers an injured Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) stranded in the Arctic ice, it marks the beginning of a frightening tale. The son of one of Switzerland's most renowned surgeons (Charles Dance), Victor has spent most of his adult life obsessed with defying death by reviving dead human tissue. It's only when he meets a rich weapons manufacturer named Harlander (Christoph Waltz), however, that he's able to finally procure all the equipment necessary to bring his dreams to fruition. Setting Victor up with a state-of-the-art laboratory located atop an abandoned tower perched on the edge of a seaside cliff, Harlander is hoping that Victor's expertise will be his salvation from the disease that's ravaging his body and mind. What neither of them could anticipate, though, is the disturbing direction Victor's ghastly experiments will take. Harvesting corpses from battlefields and public executions, Victor is able to stitch various severed limbs together to construct his own lumbering monstrosity of a man. But when this creature (Jacob Elordi) fails to live up to Victor's expectations and survives his creator's attempt to destroy him, there will truly be nowhere on the planet Victor can run to to avoid his creation’s murderous wrath. Ripe with his trademark gothic imagery and dripping with dramatic dread, Frankenstein is unmistakably del Toro through and through. Unfortunately, while this latest retelling is gorgeous to look at, there's also a glaring absence of the soul that has permeated the vast majority of his filmography. Feeling more like a patchwork of the themes and visuals from del Toro's previous movies, the result isn't a bad film per se. For those expecting a masterpiece, however, this has more in common with a reanimated corpse than life born anew. |
Frankenstein screens under the Special Presentations programme at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Its runtime is 2 hrs. 29 min.
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