Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a sumptuous take on a classic parable

Frankenstein
Directed by Guillermo del Toro Available now in select UK and US cinemas and streaming on Netflix from 7 November.

Guillermo Del Toro has long been fascinated by the frontier, where science, myth and monster meet. In his new film Frankensteinhe finally turns to Mary Shelley's seminal text: 1818 novel many argue that it gave birth to both science fiction and modern horror.

The result is visually sumptuous, executed with intensity and at times philosophically poignant—even if its pacing and some design decisions betray the heavy hand of Netflix, the film's financier.

Shelley's story about Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but reckless scientist who… dares to animate dead matter – remains one of the most compelling warnings about the promise and dangers of scientific ambition. In del Toro's film, Oscar Isaac plays Victor as a charismatic, obsessive man whose wounds, both personal and intellectual, take him into uncharted territory.

Isaac's performance combines arrogance and fragility, and the ensemble around him adds texture: Christoph Waltz as Harlander, the industrialist who funds Victor's research; Charles Dance – Victor's authoritarian father; and a standout performance by Mia Goth as Elizabeth Lavenza, a tragic and compassionate figure.

The film is at its most exciting when it lingers in the laboratory. Del Toro and production designer Tamara Deverell created an atmosphere reminiscent of the 19th century. anatomy theaters with tall apparatus and crude galvanic machines. The depiction of autopsy and experimental medicine is stylized but not entirely implausible: sparks of trust lurk in the details of ligatures, scalpels and surgical protocols.

However, Victor's corpses can cause disbelief – the sheer number and freshness of the bodies at his disposal certainly complicates realism. However, his work reflects the Romantic era debates about electricity, vitalism and the border between life and death.

The creature (Jacob Elordi) created and abandoned by Victor is not the huge figure with bolts on his neck from the 1931 film. Frankenstein. Here we see a slimmer, scarred body created through prosthetics and CGI. The combination is effective, although some close-ups, such as when the Thing lies motionless, do not reach the jawline. His appearance is also jarring: the brooding “emo” aesthetic seems closer to modern tastes than Shelley's early 19th-century milieu.

In some ways, this design is an extension of del Toro's interest in biology as bricolage. the body as a place for rethinkingas seen in his earlier films such as Shape of water. Even through a modern lens, The Creature reflects our enduring fascination with reconstructing life from fragments—a scientific dream as seductive now as it was in Shelley's time.

Narratively, Frankenstein fluctuates somewhat. Del Toro devotes the 150-minute performance to Victor's upbringing, his intellectual formation and slow seduction. dream of conquering death. While this material grounds the film in Victor's psychology, it does mean that the pacing drags and some viewers may find the long first act overkill. Moreover, the Thing's strength—here, enough to lift a ship like a piece of driftwood—risks veering into exaggeration, undermining the film's otherwise sober exploration of the scientific possibilities.

However, the main themes remain relevant. Frankenstein Ultimately, it's less about the mechanics of resuscitation and more about society's response to the unfamiliar. And the film's visuals are consistently mesmerizing, with Dan Laustsen's cinematography drenching labs and landscapes in chiaroscuro, and Alexandre Desplat's score alternating between ominous rumblings and subtle motifs of melancholy.

Del Toro's oeuvre includes more ambitious works, but Frankenstein nevertheless, it is a serious, sometimes moving examination of one of science's great parables. He asks us to consider not just whether we can create life, but whether we can live with what we create.