Chicago International Film Festival 2025: Frankenstein
No one can say the industry has ever suffered a shortage of Daddy Issues the Movie, but trust Guillermo del Toro to make one of the more enjoyable versions for his take on one of the most iconic monsters fiction has ever brought us in Frankenstein. If the director also smashes through anything even approaching subtlety with a relish that’s usually reserved for his designated villains, his vision is still an often surprisingly funny blood-soaked delicacy.
That his sympathies would lie with the so-called monster would be a given for a guy who saw the sex appeal in a fishy experiment, and del Toro is in his element here. The similarities between the creator and creation have fused the two so completely in more recent times that the mad scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac in his best amoral jackass role since Inside Llewyn Davis) and the Creature, played with anti-hero aplomb by Jacob Elordi, have often shared a name.
Del Toro hammers home what else they share in a fashion that would make Freud himself swoon, from the young scientist’s beginnings as the despised elder son to an uncaring father, bringing in Charles Dance, an actor who has come to epitomize the concept, his long-suffering mother (Mia Goth) is wrapped in crimson and killed in childbirth, possibly by her husband, so Victor’s blonde and blue-eyed brother can be the favored one. By the time Goth shows up again to play love interest to every unrelated age-appropriate man, this time wrapped in stunning blue tulle with matching feathers framing a face fascinated by a skull, it’s clear they’re both made for this.
It’s all relatively faithful to the original text while throwing in a vicious critique of capitalist warmongering and shouting out generational trauma, piling on the collateral damage while keeping the core of Mary Shelley’s original idea - that people generally are as we treat them. Violence may be inherent to nature itself, but Victor makes a very deliberate choice to abandon and outright disdain the life he’s responsible for bringing into the world. As del Toro writes it, the movie is occasionally plodding, always obvious, to the extent that a character outright tells Oscar Isaac, “You are the monster.”
But what a visual feast that puts Crimson Peak to shame, so much that it hardly seems to matter that the market is saturated with this concept, with Poor Things being released two years ago, Lisa Frankenstein the year before. Nevermind. It’s hard to complain about going back to basics when we have a diabolical mind to bring the horror and humanism to such breathtaking effect.
Rating: B+
