Which Frankenstein Character Are You?

Learn More About Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro spent the better part of three decades trying to make Frankenstein. He has described Mary Shelley's 1818 novel as the formative text of his life, the book that made him a filmmaker, and he circled adaptations of it repeatedly across his career without ever getting one financed. The version that finally arrived on Netflix in 2025 is therefore not a job of work. It is the thing he has been rehearsing for since he was a teenager in Guadalajara, and it plays that way.

Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi plays the Creature, with Mia Goth as Elizabeth Lavenza and Christoph Waltz as Heinrich Harlander, an industrialist patron invented for this telling. Elordi came to the role late, replacing Andrew Garfield, and the casting turned out to be the film's decisive gamble. The prosthetic design gives the Creature a stitched, translucent, almost porcelain quality rather than the flat-topped monster of the Universal era, and Elordi plays him with an unnerving childlike softness that makes the eventual violence land much harder.

Del Toro has been explicit that his sympathies lie with the Creature, and the film is structured to make that unavoidable. Much of the story is told from the Creature's perspective, tracking his education in language, tenderness, and betrayal. Victor, meanwhile, is rendered less as a mad scientist than as a wounded, arrogant child who never processed his own mother's death and decided the universe owed him an exception. Isaac plays him at full theatrical volume, which suits a character who has confused a tantrum with a philosophy.

The production design is where del Toro's obsessive tendencies show most clearly. The laboratory is a vast circular apparatus of brass and glass, built practically rather than digitally, and the film was shot largely on constructed sets in Toronto. Del Toro has always preferred physical craft to simulation, and the choice pays off here: the machinery has weight, the snow is cold, and the Creature exists in the same room as the actors rather than being painted in afterward.

What separates this from most Frankenstein adaptations is its fidelity to Shelley's actual argument. The 1818 novel is not a cautionary tale about science; it is a book about parental abandonment, written by a nineteen-year-old who had lost her mother days after birth and would go on to lose most of her own children. The Creature's crime is wanting a companion. Victor's crime is refusing to provide one. Del Toro keeps that structure intact and gives the Creature his eloquence back, which the Universal films famously took away.

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in the autumn of 2025, played a limited theatrical run, and arrived on Netflix in November, where it drew very large viewership. Critical reception was strong, with particular praise for Elordi and for the design work, and it entered awards conversation in the craft categories almost immediately. For a director whose last monster film, The Shape of Water, won Best Picture, expectations were not modest, and the reception suggests he largely met them.

Mia Goth's Elizabeth is the film's quiet moral center, an amateur entomologist who studies the Creature rather than fleeing him, and Goth plays her with a stillness that contrasts sharply with the men shouting around her. Waltz's Harlander, meanwhile, supplies the film's bleakest note: the reminder that ambition of this scale always has a financier, and the financier always expects delivery.

If gothic horror and beautiful monsters are your territory, try our Crystal Lake quiz, our It: Welcome to Derry quiz, or our Carrie quiz for another story about a creation nobody bothered to understand. Now: are you the maker, the made, the one who looked without flinching, or the one who paid for it all?