Film Review — Frankenstein (2025)

Does it matter if a film adaptation is not strictly faithful to the source material? It depends on how well it succeeds in doing its own thing. If the adaptation proves excellent in its own right, fidelity is hardly an issue. After all, how else do you explain why no one complained that, for example, Brad Bird’s animated masterpiece The Iron Giant (1999) bears virtually no resemblance to Ted Hughes’s novel? In the case of Guillermo Del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I don’t know if the film will entirely escape the not-as-good-as-the-book crowd unscathed, but to my mind, it deserves to.

As with his take on Pinocchio (2022), Del Toro’s genius is putting his personal stamp on the material, visually, narratively, and thematically. In the first of many departures from the novel, the film opens with a vessel on a polar expedition trapped in Arctic ice. Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) and his crew discover a severely injured Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). Subsequently, they get attacked by a Creature with superhuman strength who seems impervious to blades, bullets, and drowning, with wounds that constantly heal. The Creature demands that the crew surrender Victor to him. Victor…