--- title: Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein' Is Grand, Not Quite Great description: Del Toro's 'Frankenstein,' starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is charged with supersized feelings. That's both a plus and a minus canonical: https://time.com/7313549/frankenstein-review-guillermo-del-toro/ author: Stephanie Zacharek article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-08-30T19:25:38.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T04:51:31.486Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein' Is Grand, Not Quite Great og:description: Del Toro's 'Frankenstein,' starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is charged with supersized feelings. That's both a plus and a minus og:url: https://time.com/7313549/frankenstein-review-guillermo-del-toro/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd95d1c6f76eb26ec/6998c97207a30dcc7e77d499/PF_20240307_02900r.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: PF_20240307_02900r og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein' Is Grand, Not Quite Great twitter:description: Del Toro's 'Frankenstein,' starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is charged with supersized feelings. That's both a plus and a minus twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd95d1c6f76eb26ec/6998c97207a30dcc7e77d499/PF_20240307_02900r.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Guillermo del Toro's _Frankenstein_ May Be Grand, But It's Not Quite Great > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.  by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Aug 30, 2025 7:25 PM UTC  Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein Oscar Isaac as Victor FrankensteinCourtesy of Netflix  by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Aug 30, 2025 7:25 PM UTC [Guillermo del Toro](https://time.com/6239786/pinocchio-review-guillermo-del-toro/) does nothing by half measures, and his [_Frankenstein_](https://time.com/6344025/poor-things-frankenstein-mary-shelley-feminist/)—premiering here at the [Venice Film Festival](https://time.com/7313115/jay-kelly-movie-review/)—is so visually ornate, so charged with supersized feelings, that it feels a bit like four and a half movies squeezed into one. That’s both a plus and a minus. This is a story split into two parts: The first is told from the point of view of Victor Frankenstein, played by [Oscar Isaac](https://time.com/collection-post/4301247/oscar-isaac-2016-time-100/), a brilliant but arrogant scientist who builds a living man from the spare parts of various corpses, only to realize he can’t control the creature he’s created. In the second, the creature—played by [Jacob Elordi](https://time.com/6564822/jacob-elordi-saturday-night-live-host-best-moments/), made up to look like an oversize god made of veined, moving marble—tells his part of the story. He never asked to be brought into the world, yet there he is, yearning to be a part of humanity but instead shunned and feared because of his monstrous size and strange, coarse behavior. The second half of _Frankenstein_ is where the grand emotions start getting pumped in, and where the problems begin. It’s almost as if we can’t be trusted to have the correct feelings for this misunderstood creation—and so the movie orchestrates those feelings into being rather than teasing them out of us. That’s a disappointment, because this is the kind of story Del Toro seems made to tell. Though he uses [Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel](https://time.com/5133735/wollstonecraft-grave-mary-shelley-frankenstein/) as a framework, he allows the story to branch out into fanciful, inventive rivulets. In the first half, we learn about the cruelty of Victor’s physician father (played by an icily menacing Charles Dance), who tries to remake his young son (at this point played by Christian Convery) in his own image, punishing him cruelly when he fails. Victor lives for the love and care of his mother; he’s bereft when she dies in childbirth, but he also vows to conquer death. As a young man, he gets kicked out of medical school for trying to reanimate a half-corpse pieced together from the parts of two deceased humans. Luckily, a rich arms merchant with ulterior motives, Christoph Waltz’s Harlander, offers to set him up with a laboratory to perfect his life-creation technique. Victor fine-tunes his research, and eventually succeeds in bringing to life a patchwork man of superhuman strength, put together with body parts plucked from corpses left behind on a battlefield. His creation has the naivete of a baby and the stature of a giant; he’s a child-man who needs to learn everything.  Jacob Elordi as The Creature Courtesy of Netflix Victor’s frustrated “monster” will later seek to destroy the man who created him. One problem is that they’re both in love with the same woman. The gentle, brainy Elizabeth Lavenza ([Mia Goth](https://time.com/6990983/mia-goth-interview-maxxxine/)) is the fiancée of Victor’s younger brother, William (Felix Kammerer), but with her interest in the weird world of nature, she’s more in tune with Victor, and there’s a spark between them. Later, it will be she who treats Victor’s creature-creation with the kindness he craves. For obvious reasons, this love triangle is doomed. Victor sees that he can’t control the monster he’s created. He tries, and fails, to destroy it: it has self-healing properties that ensure its everlasting life, a life it doesn’t even want. That “it,” as played by Jacob Elordi, is both noble and frustrated, and the movie’s second half tells his story. He escapes murder at the hands of his creator, and makes his way to a farm in the countryside, where he must retreat from humans who fear him and want to kill him. He observes, from his hiding place inside a mill, a small family whose eldest member is a sensitive blind man (David Bradley). The creature yearns to become part of this family, an obvious impossibility. But the blind man ends up befriending the creature, having no sense of its frightening demeanor. The creature, with the old man’s bookshelf at his disposal, learns to read, and his head becomes filled with the language and ideas of Milton and Shelley. Eventually, he’ll be driven to seek the man who created him, to make a vital, anguished request. This is fertile territory for a filmmaker like Del Toro. If you’ve seen his 2017 film [_The Shape of Water_](https://time.com/6224330/cabinet-of-curiosities-guillermo-del-toro-best-episodes/)_,_ you know how much sympathy he has for misunderstood monsters, though he’s hardly alone in having those feelings. It would be hard to watch [James Whale’s 1931 _Frankenstein_](https://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1676793%5F1676808%5F1676829,00.html) and not feel something for Boris Karloff’s hulking misfit, brought to life only to be denied the best of life's meager pleasures. But Whale’s film allowed us to work out those shimmering, submerged emotions for ourselves—they almost feel like a secret we’re not supposed to know. Del Toro’s movie grabs on tight to make sure we don’t escape our own feelings. Long before the creature locates Victor and makes his eloquent, plaintive case—“I am obscene to you, but to myself, I simply _am_.”—we’ve gotten the point. Alexandre Desplat’s score, swelling at the precise moments when we might like to be left alone with our feelings, often feels intrusive. The grand scale of this _Frankenstein_ is unavoidable; what it’s lacking is intimacy.  Mia Goth as Elizabeth in 'Frankenstein' Courtesy of Netflix But this is still a [Guillermo Del Toro movie](https://time.com/collection/most-influential-people-2018/5217579/guillermo-del-toro/) we’re talking about, and the best thing is that nearly everything in it looks to have been touched by human hands. The imposing gothic details of Victor’s castle-laboratory—a portentous warrior-angel statue that comes to life, a screaming Medusa rondel carved in stone—vibrate with gloomy baroque majesty. A young woman’s coffin—its lid featuring with a hole lined with red velvet, so her mourners can get one last look at her lifeless face—is carved with creamy white swirls resembling the folds of a shroud. The costumes (by Kate Hawley) are magnificent, period-specific but in a fanciful way, often rendered in colors that pop on the screen. At one point Elizabeth shows up in a short fitted jacket made of fabric embossed with what look like slices of malachite, a multi-stranded necklace of coral around her neck—it’s like seeing the colors of nature anew. As Victor skulks around a church, spying on Elizabeth as she makes her way to confession, his outlandish outfit prevents him from being as invisible as he’d thought: he’s matched a shiny striped velvet frock coat with plaid trousers, topping it off with a kind of high-crowned trilby—something Prince would have worn had he lived in the mid-19th century. Isaac makes a persuasive, wild-eyed Victor—he wears his perpetual torment on his blousy poet’s sleeve. And Elordi’s creature, with his weirdly elongated frame, reflects the [spirit of David Bowie’s alien outsider](https://time.com/magazine/us/4180259/january-25th-2016-vol-187-no-2-u-s/) in Nicolas Roeg’s _The Man Who Fell to Earth._ His icy, anguished eyes—though both are the same color—convey all the torment a misfit on Earth might feel. There’s definitely a soul in there; we can see it without being urged to look for it. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/7313549/frankenstein-review-guillermo-del-toro/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/7313549/frankenstein-review-guillermo-del-toro/"},"headline":"Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein May Be Grand, But It's Not Quite Great","datePublished":"2025-08-30T19:25:38.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:51:31.486Z","description":"Del Toro's 'Frankenstein,' starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is charged with supersized feelings. 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