Some thoughts on Frankenstein (2025)

A number of people (hey, zero is a number) have asked me my thoughts on Guillermo Del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein. I’m going to try to limit myself to the screenplay, which makes a number of lethal mistakes.

The novel Frankenstein is over 200 years old, and has been adapted thousands of times. I’ve seen dozens myself, without even seeing most of the Universal movies or being any kind of Frankenstein expert. Guillermo Del Toro certainly must know that he’s up against some of the most well-trodden cinematic tropes of all time, so when he chooses to divert from or adhere to the source material, as well as the centuries of lore that have grown from it, it greatly sways my opinion one way or another.

Spoiler alerts for everything going forward!

The movie starts with a long prologue set in the frozen Arctic (about which I will have more to say later), which is also a significant portion of the novel and many other adaptations. So the whole first part of the movie was slow-going for me, I’d seen these scenes a hundred times and the director’s filmmaking style, which, more and more, emphasizes old-style Hollywood glamour and sheen, wasn’t adding any new context to those scenes.

Then, for a good chunk of the movie, it gets really exciting, as the script explicates Victor’s processes, both mental and physical, for building his perfect creation. For those coming in late, Mary Shelley gives no description whatsoever as to Victor’s method for building his monster, so, while that area of the narrative is wide open for artists to go wild, most adaptations give us merely more elaborate versions of the methods in the James Whale movies: a spooky castle on a mountaintop, a dug-up dead body, a bunch of elaborate lab equipment that shoots sparks, and a revival procedure that depends on a complicated series of precision-timed events, including a massive electrical storm.

The new movie hits every one of those tropes, but adds a fascinating new wrinkle: funding. Victor meets an ultra-wealthy defense contractor, who agrees to give him all the money and materiel he needs to build his monster. And, for a half-hour or so, the movie comes to life, as we see the horrifying scope of Victor’s process. He plows through hundreds of corpses, provided to him by the defense contractor, and assembles his monster piece by piece. This new angle on Victor, where he goes from being a crank with a dream to a war criminal because another war criminal is funding him, is a vital and invigorating new take on Frankenstein that got me really excited about where the movie was going.

At the end of this act of the movie, Victor has assembled his monster and the lightning storm is coming, and suddenly the defense contractor announces that he is dying of syphilis and wants Victor to put his brain in the body of his splendid new creature.

At that point my brain kind of exploded, for a number of reasons. On the one hand, I had been thinking for the past half-hour that the defense contractor wanted to fund Victor’s project because the end product would be an immortal, unstoppable killing machine that he could use to sell to all the feuding kingdoms of Europe, so the last-second announcement that his intent the whole time was to have his syphilitic brain put into the product is a fantastic twist. On the other hand, if that had been his intent all along, it seems to me that bringing it up at the last minute, asking Victor to perform last-minute BRAIN SURGERY, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LIGHTNING STORM, WHERE EVERYTHING HAS TO BE TIMED PRECISELY OR IT WON’T WORK, makes the defense contractor an idiot. Worse, it breaks the audience’s faith with the script. If a character is an idiot, the stakes plummet. If the character has been presented as a wily, Machiavellian master manipulator of men’s emotions, and is then revealed to be an idiot, the stakes go through the ground.

Which, oddly enough, is exactly what happens to the defense contractor: he bumps his head and falls down a hole and goes splat. In the space of less than a minute, the script brings up a fascinating new idea, then adds a different twist that makes it stupid, then says “Never mind, that’s dumb, kill it,” and essentially flushes the character down the toilet. After a sold half-hour of “yes, and”-ing Shelley, the script suddenly “no, but”s its own genius and goes right back to adapting the novel.

That, in and of itself, broke my trust with the movie. It suddenly went from fascinating to insulting to boring.

Going back to the beginning: The movie opens with a set piece where the monster comes upon this ship frozen in the Arctic, and runs amok, killing six crewmen who were only defending their ship. After the script plods through the rest of the novel, we come back to that ship, and the monster is back, but now it’s nice, and so the sailors let it on board and bring it to the captain’s cabin so it can have a nice chat with the captain and tell its life story.

So: the movie opens with the big violent set piece, because the director wants people to get jazzed about this exciting new version of Frankenstein. This creature is seven feet tall and now has Wolverine powers! Awesome! Look at it go! It’s unstoppable and horrifically violent!

But then, after we’ve sat through most of the movie, the director now wants us to think differently about the monster. So he has the crewmen on the ship think differently about the monster. Now, me? If I were a crewman on a ship frozen in the Arctic and a seven-foot, unstoppable, supernaturally gifted, indestructible monster killed six of my crewmen, I’m not sure I would be so quick to warm up to it. That is to say, again, when the character behave like idiots, the stakes plummet. Who cares what happens to idiots?

Anyway, the basic plot of the framing story is that the monster, angry about the state of the world, has fled north, and Victor has followed it, intent on destroying it. He’s given it a good shot, but the monster cannot die. Now we’re on this frozen ship, and its time for Victor and his monster to have their showdown.

And then the monster says “Now let me tell you MY story.” And the script makes the unforgivable decision to, after two hours of runtime, to START THE STORY OVER. At exactly the moment the narrative needs to speed up, to hurtle to its conclusion, it stops dead and becomes a very pastoral, slowly-paced slog through the novel. Again.

No script could recover from that, but this one manages one final insult. As the movie nears its conclusion, the monster, out of nowhere, forgives Victor, kisses him on the forehead and forgives him. The script does absolutely nothing to build a bridge between the monster’s blinding rage and his loving forgiveness. It feels like the monster just looks at his watch and says “Well, we better wrap this up. In closing, um, well dad, you were a misunderstood genius, and I guess you gave me eternal life, and that’s pretty cool I guess.” And to have his last line to him be “Victor,” after the script has told us at least FIVE TIMES that VICTOR means WINNER, the monster’s farewell to the fucking psychopath who dragged him into the world, created out of the parts of thousands of dead people, funded by a fucking war criminal, is, essentially, “you win.”

Let me repeat that. In a story that has been reconfigured to be a story about the cycle of child abuse, the movie ends with the abuse victim forgiving his abuser with the words “you win.”

I have no idea what the fuck I’m supposed to do with that.

I get that the movie is about the cycle of abuse, that the monster “rises above it” and forgives his abuser. And I fucking call bullshit. You cannot go from “rampaging, unkillable monster” to “so long dad, I love you, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life roaming the earth, like Cain, in Kung Fu,” without putting SOMETHING in there to account for the change of heart. If you want to make that the point of your movie, the whole movie has to be about just that journey, not a footnote added because the runtime has gone past its limit.