Frankenstein

Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro’s visually sumptuous adaptation of Mary Shelly’s gothic masterpiece finds Oscar Isaac as the brilliant but egotistical scientist whose unearthly creation, eerily and ingeniously conjured by Jacob Elordi, blurs the boundaries between life, death and madness. Victor Frankenstein (Isaac) is tortured by ambition and his own raging passions. Pushing his work beyond scientific certainty, he punctures the veil between life and death, and brings a new being into existence in a spectacular moment of creation. Frankenstein’s monster (Elordi) begins as a powerful, dangerous beast, but carries the equally dangerous capacity to learn from human behavior. Soon, the creature puts Victor and his family in jeopardy, including his brother’s fiancé, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), leading to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation. Having spent most of his life absorbing and distilling the Frankenstein story and all its lore, Guillermo del Toro takes thrilling liberties with the source novel, and the result is a singular vision that could only have come from cinema’s master of the monstrous.  (Dir. by Guillermo, 2025, USA, 149 mins., Rated R)