Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is the culmination of a lifelong obsession — a lavish, deeply personal adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel that the Oscar-winning director had dreamed of making since childhood. Oscar Isaac stars as Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant and arrogant scientist whose hubris drives him to conquer death itself, while Jacob Elordi plays the tragic Creature he assembles and then abandons. Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, and Charles Dance round out an ensemble that treats Shelley's Gothic parable of creation and responsibility with operatic grandeur.

True to del Toro's sensibility, the film is a sumptuous work of practical craftsmanship, built around enormous physical sets, handcrafted creature effects, and painterly cinematography rather than digital spectacle. Del Toro reframes the familiar story as a mournful tragedy told from two perspectives — the maker's and the made — locating genuine pathos in a Creature who is less monster than abandoned child. It is at once a horror film, a lament for fractured fathers and sons, and a meditation on mortality that reflects the director's own preoccupations.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival to a lengthy standing ovation, Frankenstein was praised as one of del Toro's most ambitious and emotionally resonant works, extending the monster-as-outsider empathy that has defined his career from The Shape of Water to Pan's Labyrinth. Released in select theaters before arriving on Netflix, it stands as a definitive modern rendering of a story that helped invent science fiction. It streams on Netflix.