FILM OF THE WEEK: Frankenstein - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

It wouldn't be Hallowe'en without a monster story, and as ever, the master of fantastical horror is holding a mirror up to society and asking who the real freak is. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein seems a story he was born to tell, steeped in familiar obsessions of faith and blasphemy, tenderness and horror, the fragility of innocence in a brutal world, and the wounds that pass from parent to child like a family heirloom. It is romantic and gothic, full of sorrow and spectacle, but also uneven in places, as though its scale sometimes outpaces its balance.

Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac with a fevered intensity, is shaped by a father (Charles Dance) who demanded brilliance and withheld affection. The film makes this lineage of harm unmistakable: Victor creates life, but what he truly wants is a reflection of himself, not a child. He is unable to accept a childlike creature without immediate intellectual mastery, and confuses control for connection, obedience for love. In this way, Frankenstein becomes a story of generational damage; the dysfunction and harm that are passed through like an inherited illness, infecting everyone unless treated and healed.

The film’s emotional gravity rests on Jacob Elordi’s creature. He is introduced not as a monster but as a newborn consciousness trying to understand the world. His movements are hesitant, then curious, then guarded. He learns to speak, then to think, then to suffer. Elordi plays him with an aching gentleness that slowly erodes into fury as Victor’s cruelty emerges. We see innocence destroyed by misunderstanding, by fear, by the inability of others - especially his maker - to offer kindness. It is a brilliant, startling performance from an actor who has so far been defined by his height and good looks, here turned into something lanky, strange and endearingly hesitant; a Bambi sliding on the (sometimes literal) ice of a cold world. Like much of del Toro’s work, the creature’s journey illustrates how the world is not merely cruel, but cruel specifically to the innocent - the film charts the creature’s journey out into the world, and how he is attacked and broken by those who cannot tolerate something fragile and strange. It’s interesting to compare the world’s treatment of the creature to that of Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, who was pursued and objectified and sexualised due to her gender, while the creature’s appearance marks him solely as a threat.

These thematic threads of cruelty, trauma, and the irresponsibility of creation solely for ego resonate and are close to del Toro’s heart, as the director has spoken out about not only religious and generational trauma but also his hatred of A.I. The creature can be read as an allegory for what we create – institutions, dogmas, technologies, artificial intelligences, children - without asking how we will nurture or guide them. The real horror in Frankenstein is not in the creation itself, but in the abandonment that follows.

Unsurprisingly for a macabre-loving director, the film does not shy away from physical horror. There are images of bodies being sawed apart, flesh peeled back, organs exposed to the light with clinical coldness, vicious and bloody attacks and accidents accompanied by a grimace-inducing score and sound effects. These moments land with force. But also in keeping with del Toro’s style, sexuality is handled with awkward avoidance. The image of the body is acceptable when being used for horror, but nudity is treated with an almost slapstick awkwardness, and sexuality is either completely avoided or referred to as a harbinger of death. del Toro may no longer be Catholic, but the shame runs deep.

Visually, the film is lush. Costumes and interiors are richly layered, heavy with texture and history. Yet the exteriors and certain dreamlike sequences, particularly those featuring the flaming red-and-black angelic figure, feel at odds with the rest. Instead of deepening the atmosphere, these images drift toward something vaguely juvenile, almost theatrical, like a fantasy series that has not yet found its tone. In Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro blended the fantastical and the real, maintaining a darkness through both, but here, the two styles sit beside each other without fully merging. The film has a limited theatrical release before coming to Netflix on November 7 and some of the visuals feel more suited to making a splashy impact on the small screen rather than impressing on a bigger one.

In keeping with modern cinema trends, the story could easily be twenty minutes shorter, and its rhythms feel overly indulgent while still lacking a satisfying sense of emotional pacing. The first act in particular is massively overlong, while an emotional climax centred on forgiveness is rushed, feeling abrupt and unearned.

Still, Frankenstein moves because it does what del Toro does: it is not a film that dismisses its monster. It sees him, grieves for him. It understands that to be born at all is a bewildering shock, and that to be rejected is a devastation that never fully heals. It understands that love, when withheld, becomes a wound that echoes forward. It asks us, as all of del Toro’s films do, to understand the cruelty of the world as monstrous, and to ask us to connect with the innocence we forget and abandon.

Frankenstein is an imperfect film. But it is also unmistakably Guillermo del Toro: bruised, beautiful, full of yearning, and haunted by the knowledge that creation is never simple, and love is never guaranteed.

Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Cinematography by Dan Laustsen. Edited by Evan Schiff.
Starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth, Felix Kammerer, Charles Dance, David Bradley, Lars Mikkelsen, Christian Convery. 150 mins.

• In cinemas now and arriving to Netflix on November 7. Watch the trailer below: