Frankenstein: Guillermo del Toro’s tragic monster opera lands at last
- In UK cinemas from 17 October 2025 in select IMAX and 35mm screenings before a Netflix launch on 7 November.
- Starring Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi as the Creature, Mia Goth as Elizabeth and Christoph Waltz as Harlander.
- 150-minute gothic drama that leans more into doomed relationships and Catholic guilt than jump scares.
- Framed between a trapped Arctic ship and fog-soaked Europe, where a bored aristocrat tries to “cure” death and accidentally invents the loneliest being alive.
- Explores abusive parenting, class, faith and what it means to call someone “monster” when you’re the one who built him.
Story in one sentence
Shipwrecked in the Arctic, Victor Frankenstein recounts how his attempt to conquer death birthed a sentient Creature who now hunts him across Europe demanding love, justice and revenge.
Setting the scene
Trapped in the ice with a confession to tell
The film opens on a Danish expedition ship locked in Arctic ice, already a brilliant del Toro choice. The crew drag a frostbitten Victor from the wasteland, only for a gigantic figure to claw its way across the ice demanding his creator.
From there we drop into flashback, as Victor tells the captain how a pampered, vicious little aristocrat ended up being chased to the end of the world by his own experiment. The Arctic frame gives the whole story a sense of inevitability, like we’re watching a tragedy that’s already finished.
Victor’s childhood, class and Catholic rot
Victor’s backstory is pure del Toro: a domineering doctor father, a mother who dies in childbirth and a little brother, William, who becomes the golden child. Oscar Isaac plays young Victor as a boy who learns early that love is conditional and cruelty is rewarded.
By the time he’s at medical school in Edinburgh, he’s gifted, arrogant and half in love with the idea of cheating God. The surgical scenes are clinical and upsetting, all saws and lectures, and you can see the moment he decides that corpses are just raw material.
The creation and immediate abandonment
The actual birth of the Creature is grisly but oddly intimate. There’s very little cliché lightning; instead we see Victor fussing over stitched limbs, whispering encouragement like a terrified father-to-be as the body spasms on the table.
When the Creature finally wakes, there’s a fleeting, moving moment where it grabs Victor’s hand like a newborn. Within minutes, the fear, revulsion and class disgust kick in, and Victor chains it in the tower like a dog and starts beating the humanity out of it.
Characters and performances
Oscar Isaac’s Victor: brilliant, pitiful, awards-ready
Isaac’s Victor is one of his best performances in years. He plays him as a man who can save lives in the operating theatre but cannot bear to look honestly at a single one of his own choices.
The big breakdowns are there – a warped wedding night, the Arctic confession – but what sells it are the smaller, queasier beats, like the way he flinches when the Creature calls him “father”. It’s absolutely the sort of turn that ends up in Best Actor conversations.
Jacob Elordi’s Creature: saint, child and horror icon
Elordi’s Creature is a revelation. Physically he’s huge and unsettling, but the performance is all about tentative curiosity and wounded dignity, especially once he escapes and finds brief friendship with a blind hermit.
As he learns to speak and to read, you can see the penny drop: he understands not just what was done to him, but why. The rage that follows never feels mindless; it’s the fury of someone who’s finally realised he was born purely to suffer.
Mia Goth’s Elizabeth and Christoph Waltz’s Harlander
Mia Goth’s Elizabeth isn’t a decorative fiancée. She challenges Victor’s cruelty, teaches the Creature his first gentle words and becomes the film’s clearest moral compass, which makes her fate on the wedding night land like a gut punch.
Christoph Waltz’s Harlander starts as Victor’s urbane mentor and investor, all purring encouragement and subtle threats. His mix of class entitlement and scientific curiosity offers a nice mirror of Victor, and Waltz keeps just enough menace simmering under every scene.
Any Oscar buzz?
On performances alone, there’s already chatter. Isaac feels like a serious Best Actor contender, Elordi has one of those “instant classic” monster turns that could slide into Supporting Actor, and the film itself is a natural fit for cinematography, production design and score shortlists.
Whether the Academy actually bites on something this bleak is another question, but you can feel the votes being courted from the first Venice standing ovation onwards.
How the film handles monstrosity and abuse
Victor as the real horror
Del Toro is very clear: the worst thing on screen is not the Creature. Victor gaslights everyone around him, lies about what he’s done and repeatedly frames his creation as a wild animal when we’ve watched him brutalise it.
One of the nastiest scenes isn’t even violent. Victor calmly tells William that the Creature murdered Harlander, manipulating his brother into fear and complicity with a level of emotional cruelty that’s harder to watch than any dismemberment.
The Creature’s point of view
The film gives the Creature a spine of his own, especially in the middle act as he stumbles through forests and farmhouses. His friendship with the blind man is tender and briefly joyful, which makes the inevitable tragedy feel almost unbearable.
By the time he demands a companion and then watches Victor destroy that possibility, you’re close to rooting for him to burn the whole aristocratic world down. Del Toro pushes the empathy without ever pretending the killings aren’t horrific.
Style, scares and pacing
Gothic maximalism done right
Visually, this is peak del Toro: candlelit hallways, mouldy manor houses, snow-blind vistas and laboratories that look like cathedrals to bad science. Every frame is layered with texture, from the Creature’s patchwork skin to the frost on Victor’s beard.
It’s not a jump-scare film, but there are images that will hang around your brain for days – the Creature half-emerging from the ice, Victor hobbling on his ruined leg, Elizabeth lit by stained glass as the storm closes in.
Violence that feels heavy, not cool
The violence is frequent and properly nasty, but it’s never played as spectacle. When the Creature tears into a wolf pack or gate-crashes the wedding, you feel the weight and mess of it rather than admiring the choreography.
That choice might disappoint gore-hounds, yet it fits the tone. Every broken body is another receipt for Victor’s arrogance, not a chance for the audience to cheer.
A long, sometimes indulgent runtime
At 150 minutes, the film absolutely takes its time. The Arctic frame, extended childhood section and travelogue chase each get room to breathe, which is great for atmosphere but occasionally sags the momentum.
There’s a stretch in the middle, around the farm and village episodes, where a tighter cut might have sharpened the emotional through-line. If you’re not on its wavelength, you’ll feel the length.
Standout moments
The lab fire and half-change of heart
The sequence where Victor decides to burn his lab, only to panic when he hears the Creature scream his name, might be the emotional core of the film. He tries to save the very being he’s just condemned, fails, and is physically maimed for his hypocrisy.
Isaac sells the horror of realising he’s not just a bad father but a coward. The explosion, shot in a single staggering wide, is pure gothic spectacle with an actual soul behind it.
Wedding night massacre and its fallout
The much-teased wedding night is every bit as awful as you’d expect. Del Toro stages it as a horrible collision between Victor’s fantasies of control and the Creature’s demand to be seen.
The aftermath, with William dying in Victor’s arms and calling him “the monster”, is where the film stops pretending there’s any moral ambiguity. It’s a blunt line, but the performances make it land.
The Arctic farewell
The final encounter on the ice is the closest the film comes to grace. Victor finally apologises and calls the Creature his son; the Creature, in turn, calls him father and accepts the apology without letting him off the hook.
The shot of the Creature shoving the ship free and then standing alone in the polar sunrise is classic del Toro melancholy. It’s weirdly hopeful and utterly devastating at the same time.
Who this is for – and whether it’s worth a cinema trip
For gothic drama and del Toro devotees
If you love Crimson Peak, Pan’s Labyrinth or old-school Universal monsters, this is basically catnip. It’s lush, sad, occasionally overwrought and totally sincere about its big emotions.
For general horror crowds wanting a quick scare, it’s a trickier sell. This is more tragic love story and abusive-parent horror than monster-of-the-week, and the talky stretches are as important as the set-pieces.
Final verdict and awards prospects
As an October 2025 release, Frankenstein feels like one of the month’s real event films – a long-gestating passion project that mostly delivers on the hype. It’s uneven, yes, but the highs are very high, and the central relationship is the best Mary Shelley’s story has looked on screen in decades.
On top of that, it’s hard not to see this as a live contender in awards season: Isaac and Elordi both doing career-highlight work, Mia Goth making a lot out of relatively limited screen time, and the craft departments firing on all cylinders. If you’re going to see it, it really does deserve that first watch on the biggest screen you can find.