TIFF 2025: Our Review of ‘Frankenstein’

Posted in Festival Coverage, Movies, TIFF 2025 by - September 11, 2025
TIFF 2025: Our Review of ‘Frankenstein’

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is still relevant today and still make us looks inwards to help us define who the real monster is in the story. Adapting Frankenstein is Guillermo del Toro’s latest creation, and one of his best.

Oscar Isaac plays Dr. Victor Frankenstein who’s obsessed with finding a way to control life and death. Jacob Elordi plays his creation, a man hobbled together from bits and pieces of corpses. After giving life to what he considers a monster, Frankenstein tries to destroy it, and when he fails, the creature wanders the countryside trying to find out about itself. The monster doesn’t get his wishes and all hell breaks loose.

Issac and Elordi do a perfect job of complementing each other. This is their story to tell, so really the extended cast, while needed to tell the story, aren’t nearly as important. Although I must say that like usual Christoph Waltz does steal most of the scenes he’s in.

While he always does a great job telling the story, it’s del Toro’s ability to create the right atmosphere that defines his artistic ability. He does the same with Frankenstein. His world building draws you into the story, and holds you until the final scene.

Frankenstein doesn’t have a long theatrical release scheduled, which is a shame as it looks amazing on the big screen. For those who miss the brief window though, they won’t have long to wait for it to appear on Netflix.

This post was written by
While Roderick has only been writing movie reviews for a relatively short time, he's been a fan of film for as long as he can remember. It's a love affair that started when he saw Star Wars at a drive-in theatre in Kitchener when he was four years old. In the past decade he's fulfilled his dream of interviewing celebrities, attending red carpets events at festivals such as TIFF and writing reviews for outlets such as Realstylenetwork.com. He's always on the hunt for the next big thing to hit the screen.
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