Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives with the inevitability of myth. Few contemporary filmmakers are as attuned to the poetry of monsters, and fewer still have built an oeuvre so devoted to the wounded, the wondrous, and the lonely. From Pan’s Labyrinth to The Shape of Water, del Toro has repeatedly crafted worlds where the grotesque becomes tender and the inhuman becomes a mirror. In many ways, Frankenstein should have been his ultimate expression. And yet, despite moments of breathtaking beauty, the film feels curiously unmoored from the gothic, romantic, and macabre heart of Mary Shelley’s novel.

Oscar Isaac delivers a volatile, almost venomous Victor Frankenstein — a man whose brilliance curdles into arrogance long before his creation opens its eyes. His performance pushes Victor into deliberately detestable territory, stripping away any lingering ambiguity and recasting him as a man driven less by intellectual yearning and more by a narcissistic hunger to be remembered. It is a bold interpretation, if not entirely a sympathetic one. Mia Goth, by contrast, seems misaligned with the film’s emotional wavelength; her Elizabeth feels spectral not in a tragic, Shelleyan sense, but in a way that leaves her displaced, as though the world around her was calibrated to a frequency she cannot quite inhabit.

Visually, however, Frankenstein is nothing short of sumptuous. Del Toro orchestrates frames that glow with painterly chiaroscuro — all bruise-blue moonlight, cathedral shadows, and the soft, funereal glow of candlelit laboratories. The creature’s awakening is a moment of pure cinema, a fusion of tactile prosthetics and operatic staging that reminds us why del Toro remains one of the most distinct visual fantasists working today. His fascination with the act of creation — as miracle, as violation — pulses through every coil of wire and stitched sinew.

But it is precisely here that the film begins to diverge from Shelley’s vision. Del Toro embellishes the narrative with new mythologies, symbolic digressions, and philosophical asides that, while intriguing, often pull the story away from its emotional core. Shelley’s novel is a haunting meditation on responsibility and alienation, its tragedy rooted in the fragile bond between creator and creation. Del Toro’s additions, though imaginative, diffuse this intimacy. The more the film expands outward — into backstory, lore, and ornate world-building — the further it drifts from the stark, romantic terror that makes Frankenstein endure.

This impulse is not new in del Toro’s cinema. His career is defined by a tension between narrative simplicity and imaginative excess. His greatest works embrace that balance: the aching solitude of The Devil’s Backbone, the fairy-tale fatalism of Pan’s Labyrinth, the delicate monstrosity of The Shape of Water. In Frankenstein, however, the scales tip slightly too far toward embellishment. The result is a film that is still enthralling to behold, but one that sometimes mutates the story so much that its thematic marrow — creation as curse, loneliness as inheritance — becomes diluted.

Still, even when it falters, del Toro’s Frankenstein contains moments of exquisite power: the creature standing beneath a storm-lit sky, grappling with consciousness; Victor, trembling not with triumph but with the first stirrings of dread; the quiet spaces where the monster reaches toward a world that will not reach back. These sequences remind us of what del Toro understands so deeply — that monsters are never the true horrors, but rather reflections of what humanity refuses to confront.

The Prognosis:

Frankenstein may not be the definitive adaptation its pedigree suggests. But as a work of del Toro’s imagination — a meditation on creation, isolation, and the fantastical — it is still compelling, still resonant, and still marked by the unmistakable touch of a filmmaker who has spent his career searching for beauty in the broken.

• Saul Muerte