In the Flesh: Frankenstein (2025)

It’s nice to be reminded that Oscar Isaac can act. After years of sleepwalking through airless franchise crap, here he is throwing himself into a project he obviously cares deeply about. His incarnation of Victor Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s infamous death-obsessed scientist, is tightly wound and rigorously unselfaware, his face frequently twisted by overt denial, his body language curt and hurried. It’s a good performance. Forceful. Specific. It’s a pity it’s stuck in the middle of something so toothless. Director Guillermo del Toro takes Shelley’s novel and systematically defangs it. The creature’s (Jacob Elordi) murder of Victor’s younger brother, William (Felix Kammerer), is now an accident rather than cold-blooded crime. His vengeful murder of Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is excised, replaced by Victor accidentally shooting her. He has none of the original text’s cold, calculating resentment in him outside the bookending sequences in the Arctic. Some half-interesting ideas spring up as a result of these changes — Victor’s uncontrollable rage at seeing the creature receive from Elizabeth the tender mothering the loss of which colored his own childhood so powerfully is a fascinating wrinkle, for instance.

By and large, though, del Toro’s changes serve to make the creature less compelling while simplifying the conflict between him and his creator. That the film ends with its two leads holding hands and reconciling on Victor’s deathbed doesn’t help cut through the sickly sweet smell of saccharine, which del Toro can’t seem to keep himself from sprinkling on Frankenstein. The early effects for Victor’s galvanically-animated corpses are entrancing enough to earn it a little leeway, as are the film’s costumes and many of its sets, especially the frozen battlefield where Victor and his patron, Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), scavenge for bodies. It’s in Waltz’s storyline, though, where the film’s seams really start to show. There’s nothing wrong with an artist taking a free hand in adapting art, even famous and beloved art. A great adaptation brings something new to the material, approaches it in a way that complicates and enriches it, that uses its weaknesses and changing context to grapple with its heart. Spending twenty minutes of a 150-minute film on half-assed commentary about arms dealers and technocrats afraid of mortality, however, does not rise to this level.

In her review of the film, critic Willow Catelyn Maclay immediately cottons to del Toro’s affection for the creature, and for monsters in general, as dragging down the entire production. He’s unwilling to probe the creature’s darkness, sublimating it instead into nasty but emotionally empty action scenes. He can’t bear to leave the parental tensions between Victor and the creature unresolved, so he ends it with a pat scene of forgiveness. Like the film’s often indifferent framing and shaky CGI, Frankenstein gives the impression of being something about which del Toro is passionate but perhaps overexcited. There’s a fannish nature to his engagement with a text, and as a result he leaves it largely unchanged in its broad strokes while excising its more challenging elements and half-heartedly appending his own underdeveloped ideas. He cannot bring himself to tear down before building. Frankenstein is a labor of love, clearly, but love isn’t enough to bring it to life.