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(CIFF Review) Beauty and Abuse Collide in Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN

By. Professor Horror

                                                                                             

 

(Chicago International Film Festival) — Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Frankenstein played at CIFF, and it’s every bit the visually ravishing, philosophically grotesque masterpiece one might expect from the director of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. At nearly two and a half hours, it occasionally lingers too long on its own artistry, but its pacing feels deliberate...like a slow dissection meant to expose the raw, pulsing heart beneath the myth. This FRANKENSTEIN is less about invention than vivisection: the slicing open of moral, emotional, and bodily boundaries in the name of progress.

 

The film opens in 1857, in the northernmost reaches of the world. A ship carves through the frozen wasteland, its exhausted crew hammering away at ice that refuses to yield. The captain (consumed by obsession) drives them forward until something inhuman stirs within the blizzard. Del Toro stages this introduction like a scientific specimen coming to life beneath flickering lamplight: the Creature (Jacob Elordi), a towering, sinewed body of reassembled parts, impervious to bullets and to pity. He is an Adam born from surgical ambition rather than divine breath...a being whose existence is both an experiment and a punishment.

                                                                     

The story unfolds in two distinct halves: one from Viktor Frankenstein’s (Oscar Isaac) perspective, and the other from his creation’s. The first half chronicles Viktor’s descent from privileged prodigy to anatomical heretic. Raised as the son of a Baron, Viktor is pushed to master every detail of surgery. Through voiceover, the older Viktor narrates his childhood, a reminder that the curious boy and the tormented man coexist within the same body. When his experiments cross the threshold between study and sin, the results are inevitable: excommunication, obsession, and the creation of life that is not life at all. Elordi and Isaac are a perfectly mismatched pair because their performances mirror one another like distorted reflections in a laboratory mirror. Isaac’s Viktor is magnetic and monstrous, equal parts surgeon and zealot, while Elordi’s Creature moves with the tragic confusion of something half-born, half-rejected. Their dynamic becomes even richer when the surrounding figures enter the frame, grounding their madness in human motives and moral compromise. Christoph Waltz adds a sinister elegance as Heinrich Harlander, the benefactor funding Viktor’s forbidden research, and Mia Goth glides between love interest and moral witness, embodying del Toro’s fascination with women who see the horror men create but still long to touch it.

 

Beyond the performances, FRANKENSTEIN is an aesthetic autopsy of Shelley’s gothic imagination. Del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen construct vast, cathedral-like sets filled with brass machinery and disturbing anatomy tables...spaces that feel both ecclesiastical and surgical. The film’s texture evokes a Bernie Wrightson illustration: ornate, shadow-drenched, and pulsating with detail. Every frame seems flayed open, revealing wires, viscera, and veins of emotion beneath the romantic veneer. However, it takes nearly an hour before del Toro unsheathes his scalpel and plunges into the more overt horror. The first act is meticulous in its buildup as it creates a careful cataloging of Viktor's life and the moral rot that led him to conquer death. When Viktor’s epiphany arrives, the film becomes a feast of anatomy. We see organs stitched, veins soldered, the viscous “stuff” of creation exposed in close-up. Del Toro forces the audience to witness the physicality of resurrection: the cracking bone, the stitched flesh, the gasping emergence of a body reclaimed from death. It’s both revolting and reverent and a hymn to science and sacrilege alike.

                                                           

 

But Viktor’s genius comes with an emotional blindness. His creation is a success only in the most literal, biological sense. Once life is achieved, care ends. In his obsessive pursuit to overcome mortality, Viktor forgets humanity. “Pro-life” in the most clinical, detached sense, he refuses to nurture what he’s made, condemning the Creature to a second death through neglect. In del Toro’s hands, this abandonment becomes a metaphor for generational trauma: child abuse begets child abuse, experiment breeds experiment.

When the narrative shifts to the Creature’s perspective, the film takes on a different tone (slower...more introspective) like an autopsy performed on a soul. The Creature wanders through the frozen world as both subject and specimen as he dissects the meaning of existence through pain and observation. His story mirrors Viktor’s but inverts its hierarchy: one man kills to feel alive, the other lives to understand why he was made.

 

The dual structure (two halves, two lives, two experiments) may strike some as uneven, but it is the tension between them that animates the film. FRANKENSTEIN is, after all, a tale about symmetry gone wrong. The length and repetition feel intentional, like watching the same experiment conducted twice with different outcomes. In del Toro’s laboratory, beauty and abuse share the same body, and creation itself becomes the most violent act of all.

 

FRANKENSTEIN is curredntly in select theatres and will start streaming on Netflix on 7 November. 

 

Check out some of the other films playing at CIFF: A Bizaree Japanese horror comedy about forming human pyramids New Group.  The Newest from Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone Bugonia. And Nia DaCosta's beautifully dark adaptation of Hedda.