TIFF 2025 Review: Frankenstein – “epic and grand in scope.”

Traumatized by the death of his mother when he was a child, Victor Frankenstein devotes himself to overcoming death through science.

A mysterious creature pursues an injured man rescued by sailors attempting to dislodge their ship from the polar ice.  It turns out that the hunted is Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and he explains the events leading up to his current situation.  Being trained to follow in his father’s medical footsteps, the adolescent discovers his true calling when his mother dies during childbirth and he seeks the means to reanimate the dead.  The pursuit becomes a lifelong obsession and leads to a creation that threatens to unravel the world of its creator.

The narrative has been broken down into three distinct chapters, consisting of a prologue and the points of view of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature (Jacob Elordi).  This is a smart approach as it provides the audience with a better understanding of the characters and their motivations.  One of the cleverest and ambitious scenes has Victor doing a presentation in front of the medical society involving the torso of a corpse that gets reanimated and is able to catch and throw a ball.  Guillermo del Toro has developed the art of depicting the grotesque in the most beautiful of ways, such as when various body parts from different corpses are being assembled into a new creation.  Prosthetic makeup is relied upon for the creation of the creature, which is more stitched together than disfigured, while digital effects allow for the presence of rats and a pack of vicious wolves.

Macabre humour is prevalent, especially when the protagonist goes through a battlefield littered with dead soldiers as if he were at the supermarket with his shopping list.  At the core of the story are three major themes: humans being the true monsters, being so focused on the journey leaves one ill-prepared to deal with success, and immortality is a lonely proposition.   Oscar Isaac remains a highly reliable performer and convincingly portrays a maniacal scientist so blinded by his ambition that he loses all sense of humanity.  Jacob Elordi embodies the Creature in a way that makes his transition from having the mind of a child into an adult believable.   Mia Goth certainly has an ethereal Gothic quality that makes her well-suited as the pursued love interest with the ability to find beauty beyond the surface of things.  The settings tend to be more contained but that does not prevent the visuals from being epic and grand in scope.

The 50th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 4-14, 2025, and for more information visit tiff.net.    

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada; he can be found at LinkedIn.