Guillermo del Toro was put on this earth to make a Frankenstein movie, and no one knows that better than him. Synonymous with both monster flicks and gothic romance, half of the Mexican auteur’s filmography already operates like a trojan horse adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, as stuffed with practical creature effects as it is ruminations on the human condition. It’s a hand-in-glove fit, to the point where del Toro has been trying to get his version off the ground for almost two decades, with halts in production only intermittently caused by studio interference. “… Frankenstein to me is the pinnacle of everything,” he told Den of Geek back in 2016, “…I dream I can make the greatest Frankenstein ever, but then if you make it, you’ve made it. Whether it’s great or not, it’s done. You cannot dream about it anymore.” Those aren’t the words of someone in a rush to mount their passion project, but there’s only so much procrastination that can be justified when Netflix comes a’callin.’ With the streaming giant’s robust pocket book, unbeatable audience reach, and famed lack of meddling producers, del Toro’s bucket list flick couldn’t have hoped for a better home and moment, but opportunity is rarely on time. It certainly didn’t arrive early, but, having rattled around in its maker’s brain for eons, it might well have aged past its sell-by date.

All those years of mounting exquisitely-crafted, hauntingly tactile period pieces would seem to have del Toro in ideal fighting shape, and the auteur is eager to display his credentials here at every visual turn. The film’s opening act, which charts the adolescence and early adulthood of science-enthused sad boy Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), is sumptuously erected, each frame as replete with exacting detail as our centrifugal inventor’s mind is with bad ideas. Eternally mourning the untimely passing of his mother during childhood, Victor has taken it upon himself to defeat death, a quest that sees him kicked out of a lofty Edinburgh college, his pursuits subsequently financed by a shady, arms-dealing benefactor named Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz). A few months in the laboratory and some war-torn corpses result in The Creature (Jacob Elordi), a towering brute of mismatched anatomy whose rudimentary intellect and wearying super-strength have Victor finally questioning his own ambition. A parallel enlightenment awaits The Creature, Frankenstein’s second act unfurling as an undead travelogue wherein our new protagonist learns the ropes of human existence. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t love what he discovers.

At least he’s breaking new ground, a far cry from a movie that’s determined to hit every well-trodden mark under the sun. Having been regurgitated and iterated upon for centuries now, no adaptation of Shelley’s work will ever be able to lean on the element of surprise, a detriment that our latest edition makes up for with a bit of rejiggering. While the events themselves remain largely unchanged, del Toro’s screenplay refreshes their order and employs composite characters in the name of both efficiency and tiny burblings of revelation. It’s a curious choice, rearranging the furniture without adding or subtracting much in the way of baseline materials, a tacit acknowledgement of the source text’s over-exposure that does little to affect our preconceived notions. If anything, mapping the divergences is distracting, sending the viewer’s mind back to high school English class to spot the differences, rather than engaging with the story as it’s unfolding. Most adaptations of classical literature are wise to intermittently break from their inspirations to keep things fresh and relevant to current affairs, but del Toro’s unmissable fealty to Shelley’s primordial work makes the refashioning come off as half-hearted or over-cooked. 

He’s better as a steward than an iconoclast, a contrast that shines through whenever Frankenstein allows itself to simply play a familiar tune with the best instruments and engineering that money can buy. It’s all up there on screen, a wild embarrassment of riches provided by piles of Netflix cash, and artisans who are hellbent on spending every last penny. ‘Best’ is always a subjective term, but if Academy voters are simply looking for most, production designer Tamara Deverell should be preparing her Oscar speech, having crammed a merciless amount of detail and precision into each and every frame. Kate Hawley’s costumes follow suit, an ocean of sartorial eccentricities and preposterously bold hues, all captured by cinematographer Dan Laustsen’s ever-roving camera. Opulence is rarely this striking, and while it’s all deeply impressive, the movie’s insistence on aesthetic maximalism leaves little room for air.

That goes for the viewer as well as the characters at hand, both seemingly gentrified out of genuine emotional investment, doubling down on an issue that our prepackaged familiarity already brought to the fore. Empathizing with a figure as culturally omnipresent as Victor Frankenstein is a tough ask, as difficult for Isaac as it is the audience. He’s sturdy but hardly knowable, performing in a stilted, Shakespearian register that never allows you to see the person behind the madman archetype. Elordi gets closer, but his persistent suffering is easier to understand than feel, presented as a stew of glowering torment that’s cooked exclusively with trusty, award winning ingredients. His objective beauty doesn’t help the cause, an uphill battle that Mia Goth, who plays an amalgam of just about every female in Shelley’s book, is used to fighting her way through with feral aplomb. Positioning her as the feminine divine personified isn’t miscasting so much as a waste of invaluable resources, placing a powder keg in the middle of the room and refusing to light the wick. Like everyone else in attendance, she’s here to make sure the trains run on time, populating a film that only harbors fleeting interest in its would-be propellants. 

Their share of Frankenstein’s mental real estate mostly goes to the orgiastic mise-en-scène, but del Toro saves just enough acreage to tilt the proceedings toward his trademarked thematic purposes. Anti-authoritarianism, long a hobby horse of the helmer’s canon, is relegated to the fringes by the material, making way for the tortured family histories and pleas for forgiveness that forever populate his filmography. The Creature’s cursed relationship with his creator would seemingly be enough to explore that former tenet, but del Toro wholly reconfigures the character of Victor’s father as a means of italicizing the point. Paternal trauma begets paternal trauma, and in case you’ve somehow missed the motif, here’s Charles Dance, cinema’s preeminent domineering father figure, to clue you in before dialogue has even been exchanged. He wouldn’t know warmth if he was stranded in the Sahara desert, passing that chilly remove on down to his progeny before a watery-eyed jumble of stitched-together limbs teaches everyone in the theater about the awe-inspiring power of absolution. It’s a tale as old as time; it’s also, unequivocally, not Frankenstein.

Which isn’t a demerit. Modern moviegoing is entirely too indebted to the successful yarns of the past, and adaptations should be graded on efficacy, not accuracy. There’s just no identifiable reason for del Toro’s latest to contort itself into Shelley’s rubric, especially when the myriad changes make it more riff than recitation, akin to any number of his previous features. We’ve been here before, awash in the sights and sounds of a master curator with a blank check in his pocket, turning radiant dreams into handsome, nightmarish realities. This one just happened to overstay its welcome in the cranium, and if there’s a lesson to be learned from 2025’s Frankenstein, it has nothing to do with clemency or patriarchal sin. If you love something, put it out into the world before the years have seen it curdle into a completely different entity. There’s something to be said for patience and waiting for the opportune moment. There’s more to be said for not overthinking things.