Frankenstein (2025): Guillermo del Toro's Oscar Winner Is a Monster Movie About Forgiving Your Father

On his first morning alive, the Creature is standing at the foot of Victor Frankenstein's bed, wrapped in bandages and too tall for the room. Victor bolts upright. The Creature copies him, shifting left, then right, and when Victor stretches his arms toward the light, the Creature does that too, basking like a plant. Within days he learns a single word, and it is his father's name: Victor.

Hold on to that word, because Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is built around it. On the surface, it's a lavish gothic monster movie, nominated for nine Oscars including Best Picture and the winner of three, for production design, costume design, and makeup and hairstyling. Underneath, it's a monster movie about forgiving your father, made by a director who says the theme he always wanted to decipher is "fathers and sons." After three weeks in theaters last fall it debuted at No. 1 on Netflix, and as of late October 2026 it's still streaming there, included with a subscription.

Why It's a Masterpiece

Del Toro splits the film in two, and the split carries the meaning. It opens on a Danish ship, the Horisont, frozen into the Arctic ice, where sailors haul aboard a frostbitten, one-legged Victor (Oscar Isaac) moments before something enormous comes charging across the ice, shouting his name. Victor tells the captain his story; then the Creature (Jacob Elordi) answers, "My maker told his tale. And I will tell you mine."

Victor's half is the portrait of a son turning into his father. As a boy, he's drilled in anatomy by Leopold (Charles Dance), the most celebrated surgeon of his day, who strikes him across the face for wrong answers. He grows into a swaggering showman who wants to beat death, and Isaac plays him like a rock star working a stadium.

The Creature's half slows to the speed of someone learning the world. Hiding beside a farm family, he listens through the wall as a blind grandfather (David Bradley) teaches a little girl her words, and he learns along with her. "He needs to feel like a baby, and then he needs to feel like a philosopher," del Toro says. Elordi, six-foot-five under a full body of prosthetics, gets there almost entirely through stillness and his eyes. You forget the makeup by his second scene, then remember it with a jolt every time someone flinches at him.

Behind the Scenes

Del Toro first read Mary Shelley's novel at 11, and he told Consequence he knew right away it would be "a great vehicle to talk about me and my dad." That father was kidnapped in 1998 and held for more than two months until a ransom was paid, and, as TheWrap reports, he never talked about the ordeal until close to the end of his life. Del Toro calls parts of the film "obliquely autobiographical" and others direct, drawn from his life "as a son or as a father."

The Creature almost belonged to someone else. Andrew Garfield was originally cast and dropped out over scheduling, and del Toro decided that "whatever was going 'wrong' was actually going right." He calls Elordi "a full-fledged miracle." The miracle kept brutal hours. Prosthetics designer Mike Hill told The Credits that his team applied 42 silicone appliances to Elordi's head and body, a ten-hour job with a midnight call time, and that the actor never complained once.

Del Toro wanted a world you could touch; he estimates more than 90 percent of the film has a physical element. Production designer Tamara Deverell built the Horisont as a real ship on a giant gimbal, so when the Creature rocks it, the deck actually tilts and the extras really tumble. No stage could hold the ship and its ice field of steel, Styrofoam, silicone and real snow, so she built it in the studio parking lot. The crew lost their parking and had to be bused in.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• Red follows Victor. Del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen set a color rule: "The mother and the home are red." Victor loses both, so he's the only character who wears red, from his gloves to his scarf. Mia Goth, who plays his mother as well as Elizabeth, the woman he later fixates on, wears a thin red veil in the early scenes.
• The Creature's colors fade. Hill layered pastel alabaster, purple, yellow and red over an oyster-grey base, with a touch of blue as a nod to Boris Karloff's makeup. His idea: the Creature emerges like a butterfly, and as the world beats him down he becomes a moth, his colors dimming and dirtying. Compare his face in the tower to his face on the ice.
• Scars that rhyme. Del Toro says the scars on the Creature's forehead echo both a lightning bolt and the cracked face of an archangel from Victor's childhood. Deverell even bolted patchwork iron plates onto the ship's hull to echo the Creature.
• That corpse really catches the ball. In Victor's demonstration before the medical society, a half-built cadaver catches a ball he tosses. It's a puppet with several operators, radio-controlled eyes and mouth and bladders for the lungs and heart, and the catch happened in camera.

The Director's Genius Moment

Nearly every Frankenstein movie stages its creation scene as a thunderstorm of dread. Del Toro stages it as a concert. "Everybody does the creation of a monster like a stormy, scary thing," he told Netflix, "and I wanted him to have fun cutting, mixing, matching all those parts." He pointed Isaac toward Leonard Bernstein and Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman, and Isaac whirls through the tower working levers like a man at a cathedral organ. The battery columns glow green, then red. The body lies strapped to a table shaped like a crucifix. Lightning strikes, the batteries drain, and nothing happens.

Then comes the cut to the bedroom, and the bandaged figure at the foot of the bed.

Because del Toro lets us enjoy Victor's joy, we share his crash. "He never thought about anything past that point," del Toro told Consequence, calling what follows "the equivalent of a male postpartum depression." The show is over, the house lights come up, and there's a child in the room. Within a few scenes Victor has chained the Creature in the flooded basement and is mocking his childish feelings, the same contempt Leopold once aimed at him. Pain gets handed down like an old coat.

Another Way to See It

Spoiler warning: This section discusses the ending and what happens to Victor, Elizabeth and the Creature.

In Shelley's novel, the ship is a deathbed and a pyre: Victor dies still wishing he'd destroyed his creation, and the Creature leaves to burn himself. Del Toro keeps the ship and rewrites the goodbye. "If I'd made it when I was younger, it would have just been the gripes of a son toward a father," he told the Toronto Star. He also points out that Shelley spent much of her career trying to decipher her own father on the page and "never solved it." Seen this way, the film is a relay across three generations: Shelley and her father, del Toro and his, Victor and the son he made.

The road there is cruel. In the tower, Victor gives the Creature one last chance to say any word but Victor; the Creature says "Elizabeth," and Victor sets the place on fire. Later, on William's wedding day, Victor fires at the Creature and kills Elizabeth instead. His dying brother tells him, "You are the monster."

Then, in the captain's cabin, the son forgives the father. Victor asks him to say his name one last time, the way he did in their first days together. The Creature says, "Victor," and Victor dies in peace. The word that once disgusted him is the last thing he wants to hear. What the film understands is that forgiving a parent isn't the same as excusing them; it's how you make the pain stop with you. Elordi has said that on the day he shot that scene, his own father's portrait hung in his head the whole time, and that as soon as they finished, he called his dad "just so I could hear his voice."

The last image answers the first. The captain lets the Creature walk off the ship, and in return the Creature pushes the Horisont free of the ice so the crew can go home. Then he stands alone in the Arctic sun, arms outstretched, a frozen tear on his cheek: the pose he copied from Victor on his first morning alive. The father taught him one good thing, and the son kept it.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, if you can give it two and a half uninterrupted hours and a dark room. It's a Netflix original, streaming on Netflix and included with a subscription (checked late October 2026). It's rated R and earns it, with battlefield corpses, a wolf attack and plenty of blood, but it's more gothic fairy tale than fright machine, so don't come for jump scares.

It's for anyone who grew up on Karloff, anyone who cried at the end of del Toro's Pinocchio, and anyone with a complicated father. On a rewatch, watch the Creature's arms the first time he reaches for the light; now you know where they're headed. For another del Toro fairy tale about a child and a cruel father figure, read our review of Pan's Labyrinth. Then maybe do what Elordi did, and call your dad.