Frankenstein (Movie Review)

*Updated March 2026

The 1-4-0: Guillermo del Toro, who gave us Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, finally realizes a vision 30 years in the making. You can feel the weight of that patience in every frame. Jacob Elordi steals it from Oscar Isaac.

The Gist

Del Toro reimagines Mary Shelley’s classic as a gothic opera about rejection. Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein with manic energy. Jacob Elordi is the Creature.

Mia Goth plays Elizabeth, and Christoph Waltz rounds out the cast. The story chases a living corpse across Arctic deserts, 19th-century battlefields, and stormed oceans as he hunts his creator for revenge and closure.

What Works

The film unfolds in two acts with an intermission. Think Gone with the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia. By the intermission, you feel like the movie should have ended.

Isaac was the price of admission, until Elordi arrives. The second act is far better than the first.

Isaac is Hollywood A-list, the kind of Latino actor on a Gregory Peck level who can play ethnically ambiguous to mainstream audiences. I would still love to see him do a Spanish-language-only film. According to IMDb, his intensity remains unmatched.

Here he is exuberant, passionate, operating at high voltage. At times mesmerizing, at times exhausting. The character stays with you because Isaac commits completely, even when the energy overwhelms.

Elordi does something I have never seen in 200 years of Frankenstein adaptations. He makes you feel sorry for the monster. Physically, he moves with the confusion of a newborn trapped in a battlefield corpse. Vocally, he finds a wounded growl that breaks into something childlike.

Emotionally, he plays the Creature as a soul who knows he was abandoned before he took his first breath. Mike Hill’s prosthetics, 42 separate appliances pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, give Elordi a face to work with. He fills it with grief.

We have seen creatures behave with human empathy before. E.T. The Amphibian Man in del Toro’s own The Shape of Water. Elordi goes somewhere else. He studied Karloff and contemporary creature features, but the preparation disappears into something raw. Expect an Oscar nomination. If he does not get one, it is an upset.

Alexandre Desplat’s score swells from intimate piano to an 80-piece choir with church organs. Del Toro’s operatic vision demands maximalism, and Desplat delivers.

The Latino DNA

It does not pass me by that a Mexican director and a Latino movie star just redefined one of America’s most iconic monsters on the world’s biggest streaming platform. This is the third significant Universal Monster film with notable Latino representation.

The 1931 Dracula had Carlos Villarías, half-Spanish, half-Mexican, starring in the Spanish-language version. Benicio del Toro carried The Wolfman in 2010. Universal’s horror monsters and Hispanics go hand in hand.

The Latino influence here is not a stereotype or a Spanish-language invocation. It is in the DNA. Del Toro’s Mexican Catholic childhood made him see the Creature as a religious figure, a suffering Christ stitched together from the dead.

His experience as an outsider made him identify with the monster. His second-language ear for English rhythm shaped the dialogue’s cadence.

His Latino maximalism rejected boring period-piece aesthetics for operatic color and punk rock energy. Isaac connected to the father-son trauma because it mirrored his own understanding of generational pain.

You see it in how he plays Victor’s desperation. Netflix invested billions in Mexican production over the next four to five years.

This is what happens when a Mexican filmmaker gets full studio support to make his passion project. That changes what is possible for Latino creators going forward.

What Doesn’t Work

I’ll keep this short. The first act drags. Isaac’s manic energy saves it, but that same “manic-ness,” feels exhausting before the intermission. When Elordi arrives, you realize you have been watching the wrong movie.

Watch or Not?

Watch it. Understand you are committing to a two-and-a-half-hour gothic opera that rewards patience. The payoff lives in the second act, where Elordi’s Creature becomes the reason you came.

For Latinos, seeing del Toro complete his lifelong dream with this level of craft is a moment to celebrate. This is what happens when one of our greatest filmmakers makes his passion project without compromise. It is not perfect. It is unforgettable.