Frankenstein

The Monster in the Mirror

It feels like Guillermo del Toro has been walking toward *Frankenstein* for so long that I almost forgot the movie might actually arrive. He’s talked about wanting to make it for decades—fifty years, going back to seeing Boris Karloff on a tiny screen as a child—and you can feel the weight of that obsession all over the finished film. I went in expecting the usual del Toro comforts: amber liquid in glass tubes, metal groaning in the dark, Catholic gloom hanging in the air like incense. Some of that is here, sure. But the movie that emerges is less a haunted-house reverie than a raw family rupture. Instead of leaning on the lightning-bolt iconography, del Toro keeps dragging the story toward grief, rejection, and the awful banality of parental failure.



The structure is bold enough to throw people. I’m still not fully sure it balances cleanly. Del Toro splits the film almost straight down the middle: first Victor’s fever dream, then the Creature’s lonely passage through the world. That abrupt pivot creates a strange lurch in the pacing. Just when the laboratory section reaches peak hysteria, the movie drops into cold open air and stays there. Still, the disruption makes thematic sense. The moment the Creature opens his eyes, Victor is already emotionally gone. Del Toro keeps the camera low so we mostly see the creator’s back retreating from his own work. The sets are gorgeous in the expected way—part industrial cathedral, part slaughterhouse—but he’s less interested in admiring them than in the wet, bodily mess of what it costs to make life.



Oscar Isaac wisely avoids playing Victor as a cackling mad genius. He makes him feel more like a brilliant founder poisoned by his own self-myth, an arrogant tech bro displaced a few centuries backward. Isaac keeps giving Victor these small, incriminating gestures. When Christoph Waltz’s financier presses him, or when Elizabeth (Mia Goth, generous in a role that doesn’t give her much room) confronts him, Victor rubs his thumbs together as if something sticky won’t come off. His shoulders stay lifted almost to his ears, a posture that reads as confidence until you notice the panic buried inside it. And the milk—those greedy, childish gulps—turn into a perfect little tell. He wants to conquer death, but he still behaves like a frightened child desperate for soothing.



Jacob Elordi is the thing that holds the film together. After years of using his beauty as part of the performance, he lets it disappear here. Under makeup drawn from Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations and applied over punishing ten-hour sessions, he becomes something raw and broken rather than imposing. His Creature moves with heavy caution, not the usual lumbering theatrics. It’s almost graceful, but painfully so, like each step requires renegotiating with his own body. When he finally speaks, the voice comes out as a rasping, uncertain whisper. Not a monster’s roar. More like a hurt child trying to explain himself before the room turns against him. Cinema Scholars were right to write, "Beneath the makeup, Elordi radiates confusion and anguish. He's monstrous only in the way pain can make a person monstrous."

What lingers after the credits isn’t the horror iconography. It’s the parental wreckage. Del Toro takes the mad-scientist romance and strips it down until all that remains is a gifted man refusing responsibility for the life he made. The film is heavy, awkward in spots, and sometimes difficult in a way I suspect is deliberate. But I can’t shake the image of Elordi standing in the rain near the end, face lifted, letting the water run over wounds that are never going to close.