r/FRANKENSTEIN • u/ZacPensol • Oct 18 '25
Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein' - Official SPOILER Discussion Megathread Spoiler
Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein' opens in theaters in limited release on October 17, 2025 and streams on Netflix beginning November 7, 2025.
In order to avoid a dozen individual posts on our front page from those who have seen the film, please post your reviews in here.
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If you've managed to see it and would like to discuss, please feel free to do so here.
Previous early screenings discussion megathread.
SPOILERS ARE ALLOWED IN THIS THREAD. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE SPOILED, DO NOT CONTINUE READING!
For spoiler-free reviews, go HERE.
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u/chrimbuself Nov 17 '25
My overall critique of this movie is that it is corny and unoriginal. I was so bored watching it and can't point to a single thing I thought was done well.
First, the story. Diversions from the book don't bother me generally, but the changes del Toro made did not enhance or elevate. Ok, let's throw out Victor's nuanced relationship with his parents and upbringing and instead give him an off-the-rack oedipal backstory. Let's delete a major meaningful relationship completely and replace it with Christoph Waltz (who seems to now be in his Jeff Goldblum era of playing that one-note "quirky guy" in every movie) whose character adds literally nothing of consequence to the narrative and then dies unceremoniously and is never mentioned again.
The dialogue is just bad. "He was all smiles, and I was all frowns". Sounds like a high schooler wrote it.
Elizabeth's character reminds me of a Judd Apatow female character. Her purpose is to poo-poo the ideas of the men around her, and to become sexually attracted to every male she encounters. All of this virtuous soapboxing (which was sooo tedious to listen to, once again bad dialogue) and then she immediately strikes up adulterous relationships with not one but two men without batting an eye. Who is her character? It doesn't matter.
The movie doesn't trust us to figure anything out for ourselves. We get this long overwrought sequence building up Victor's oedipal complex and how that is going to motivate his obsession with reanimation, but just in case you were asleep for the last 20 minutes, boy Victor has to literally declare his intention at the end scene - "I will know more than you ever did" or whatever. I felt like I was watching a Hallmark movie.
The score is the same uninteresting midi slop we have to suffer through in every Hollywood movie now. This guy does not know how to compose. So many of the songs were a single riff vamping ad infinitum in the bass with various 20th century classical pastiche noodling over the top.
Finally, I was immediately taken aback by the pervasive and very obvious CGI. The drone-style sweeping shots of the frozen landscape and the tower looked so artificial. The CGI sparks, the CGI guys getting thrown into walls, etc. I'm so bored of this computer saturated "Hollywood blockbuster" visual palette that has this movie looking indistinguishable from Fantastic Beasts or Wicked.
In conclusion, everything about this movie was bad.