Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025)

A little late for spooky season, but hey everyday is Halloween at my house, so I fired up Netflix to watch the newest version of Frankenstein (2025) when it dropped.

The movie’s title is simply “Frankenstein,” but make no doubt about it this is Guillermo del Toro’s story, not so much Mary Shelley‘s. Whether you think that’s a good or bad thing depends on if you came to “Frankenstein” from movies and pop culture or the novel itself. I feel like del Toro came via the movies, whilst I came via Shelley, so while I appreciate and admire his aesthetic, I found the movie itself not really my thing. Also, at 2.5 hours long, I’m glad I could watch it at home because this would have been just too much in a theater.

The director / writer knew his version would stand apart from the original work, as del Toro told Little White Lies:

“When you adapt a novel, the people that love the novel have to feel the spirit of it is there, but at the same time you want to wow them with a new tale. In the first 10 minutes people have to say, ​’This is not the ​‘Frankenstein’ I know. I’m going to stay and see what happens.'”

I didn’t find the changes to the story improved anything or told a new and equally interesting story. This feels like extremely well-funded fan-fiction, the elaborate, gorgeous sets and costumes fleshing out the way one person thinks he can tell a story better than its author. Considering the positive initial reactions, some folks want that, and my opinion is in the minority (but this is my blog, so you get my opinion LOL).

Unquestionably, the movie looks good, including the costumes by designer Kate Hawley, who previously worked with Guillermo del Toro on Crimson Peak (2015). Like that movie, the color palette here is rich, tightly controlled, and linked to the characters. She told W Magazine:

“Guillermo decided the film was going to be more of a romantic tragedy than a horror, so we looked at a lot of Caravaggio paintings, because he had that tonal quality. We talked a lot about color and light.”

Peruse some of Caravaggio’s work and you’ll see he used a ton of black, white, and red. Add some vivid blue and a sort of sickly yellow, and that’s it for this movie. Victor running around in his shirt is right out of this painting, and there’s even an earlier scene setting up a photo still life that references this kind of ‘Old Masters’ work.

While some of the inspiration is older, the main part of the movie starts in 1855, which Hawley explains in a Harper’s Bazaar interview:

“[Guillermo] decided to set it in the 1850s, which was a big shift from what we’re all familiar with, with the story being set in the 18th century or the Age of Enlightenment. That was really about trying to give it a more modern sensibility. The Crimean War as the backdrop in the 1850s, there’s vast changes in the Industrial Revolution. There’s huge advancement in surgical instruments. … He wanted a modern feeling in a classical context. That came down to clothing. That was one of the first things we talked about. ‘I don’t want to see a fucking black hats and Dickensian tropes.’ When I think of Victorian, it’s very hard not to think of Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit. But this is Frankenstein. It has that Germanic kind of backdrop. There’s the early romantic sensibility, There’s the big scale of imagery of religion, God’s place in it mixed with mythology. And then there’s this feeling of nature and all those elements of melancholy, that sense of memories that creates a dreamlike world.”

The director himself trotted out that old gem too, let’s make it more “modern,” telling Little White Lies:

“I didn’t want you to feel like you were watching a Merchant Ivory version of ​‘Frankenstein,’ and I love Merchant Ivory … But this modernity is the modern Prometheus.”

I think del Toro got too hung up that “modernity” and trying to figure out exactly how the Creature is made, to the point of giving Victor a traumatic backstory that explains why he’s such an egotistical freak obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. His daddy didn’t love him — when your father’s played by Charles Dance, that’s the way it goes! — his mommy died in bloody childbirth, it’s all fodder for Victor becoming a madman. Oscar Isaac leans into this attitude with zeal, making Victor’s final redemption feel less than well earned.

That backstory is vivid and dramatic, but it makes me confused by the movie’s interior timeline. What year are these childhood scenes supposed to take place in?

That’s Mia Goth in the red, playing young Victor’s mother Claire; she later plays his brother William’s fiancée Elizabeth (if someone hasn’t written an essay about the Oedipal layers in that casting trick, they should). Here, the mother’s outfit looks to be a black-and-white stripe high-waisted gown covered by a layer of sheer red. The dress seems to be of an 1810s-ish style.

The bonnet with an exaggeratedly tall brim is very much of the “Merveilleuses” style that was briefly fashionable in the 1790s. Compare with this image:

The costume is striking, of course, but I don’t know what year we’re in. Leopold Frankenstein (Dance) wears a bicorn and a high-waisted tail coat, so his costume pulls from both late 18th- and early 19th-century styles.

Then there’s a title card saying “1855” when Victor’s an adult. Those clothes from his childhood would date from about 45 years before the main action of the story, but Victor’s not in his 50s (and in the novel, he’s a young man recently gone to university). Yeah yeah, nobody but me notices these things, but c’mon, if you’re going to create your own timeline, make the clothes fit the right generations.

In the 1850s section, Mia Goth as Elizabeth is solidly in crinoline territory, with Kate Hawley telling British Vogue:

“We kept her silhouette simple, but when it came to her crinoline fittings, Guillermo was like, ‘I want the really big ones!’ That’s great for some scenes, but a bit of a nightmare in others. It had a knock-on effect on the art department because the doorways had to be made bigger to accommodate the crinolines!”

Hoops weren’t the only complication on set, as Hawley continued in the Vogue interview:

“I was working with [cinematographer] Dan [Laustsen], he and Guillermo wanted to work with candlelight and single source lighting. It’s fantastic but actually quite hard. We did so many camera tests. We’d been asked to create all these saturated colours, but then the candlelight kind of killed them. For instance, with the first blue dress Mia wears, for weeks we had our heads in our hands, like, ‘How’re we going to do this?’ A really saturated blue silk wouldn’t read, so we used layers and there’s actually lots of greys in that gown. You look through the lens, and it works.”

That wacky blue feather headdress has gotten a lot of attention since the pix dropped.

While I couldn’t find an exact period version of it, there’s precedent for the shape — pretty typical for evening wear in the 1850s (so is that low neckline, however, this scene is more like a family luncheon so not exactly appropriate).

After a slightly contentious first meeting, Victor is smitten with his brother’s fiancée and she’s kinda returning the feelings — which, why do we need a love triangle in this story? IDK. But for their subsequent meetings where the two geek out over bugs and science facts, Elizabeth wears dresses printed with science-y stuff. Kate Hawley told British Vogue, how this came about:

“Guillermo is very specific about what [Elizabeth] reads, and one of these books was William Paley’s Natural Theology. And that, to me, imbued everything about the themes in the film — of religion and the wonders of nature. If you look at the ends of Victorian books, there’s incredible marbling. Guillermo also wanted to talk about her love of insects and cells. And in Victor’s world, you almost feel like you’re going into the creature and seeing its blood cells. I wanted to suggest all of that through the clothing. We used malachite in some instances, too — we had real bits of malachite in the workroom — and my team also spent hours drawing up cells that we then got woven into fabrics, and played with the sense of scale. We even had a whole collection of beetles in our studio to take inspiration from. It sounds dodgy, but it wasn’t.”

I think these are two different malachite green dresses, worn at different points in the film:

Elizabeth wears a red dress when she checks out Victor’s dissection. The costume designer described this to Harper’s Bazaar:

“I’d been looking at blood cells and x-rays and things, and they found their way into Elizabeth’s clothing through pattern. You’ve got a brilliant canvas with the crinoline to do that. Looking back at the period, I’m always surprised at how modern and contemporary some of those textiles and things feel. It definitely kept a more contemporary feel, like the malachite dress. It felt like we were in the world that Guillermo was creating.”

Just imagine these period dresses with creepy patterns printed on the fabrics — historical with a twist!

Some of the jewelry Elizabeth wears is real gems from Tiffany, and Kate Hawley also mentioned this in Harper’s:

“The way it happened, I was talking to Steven Newman at Netflix, said we needed jewelry and he saw what we were doing and creating, and he talked to the wonderful Kathryn Vanderveen who introduced us to Tiffany’s. They weren’t into it at the beginning. Of course, they thought of Boris Karloff. But I had all these Winterhalter portraits and Contessa Castiglione and all of these references, and then I think we were aligned in the world building. They saw the world we were trying to do and saw that that could fit.”

Let’s not forget Victor Frankenstein himself. In British Vogue, the costume designer said:

“Our references for him included Mick Jagger in Soho in the ’70s and Rudolf Nureyev — we kind of wanted him to feel like a rock star walking on stage when he entered the lab. He’s a punk and a dandy. He comes from an aristocratic background, had no money but then comes into money, and wears his clothes with a real irreverence. It’s like Francis Bacon or Picasso — he wears his clothes to stay up all night and work. He plays with all this blood and viscera, and gets it all on his clothes.”

She continued in Vogue, saying:

“One of my favourite garments in the whole film is his dressing gown. Oscar looks so beautiful in it. Victor wouldn’t go around just looking haggard — he has this William Blake energy.”

I should mention the Creature, played by Jacob Elordi with occasionally touching emotion but overwhelming rage and sadly not enough of the poetry Shelley gave him. One costume complaint: his “unclothed” (well, he’s wearing little briefs) costume looks likes he’s just wearing a spandex suit like a gymnast or other athlete might wear. Only his suit is airbrushed with random lines and shading that I guess are supposed to look like muscles, nerves, and pieces of skin stitched together. But seriously, it looked like spandex, especially when it wrinkles up. This screencap looks better than it looks moving.

Let’s end with a wedding dress, although Elizabeth’s wedding dress was an early design, Kate Hawley told W Magazine:

“Other than The Creature, that was one of the first things I drew. It’s Frankenstein’s Bride imagery. I did draw one Victorian bride look, and Guillermo just went, ‘No.’ So, I went back. Elizabeth reflects Victor’s world at the beginning, but in the end, she’s reflecting The Creature, and the bridal dress is integral to that.”

I think it’s a slightly deconstructed version of a standard 1850s wedding gown.

The costumer described the construction of the wedding gown in Harper’s Bazaar:

“We used the historical context of these Swiss ribbon bodices that were around from a bit later — we cheated it a bit — and we basically worked from the inside out. That whole thing served as a rib cage, a definite homage and evoking the image of the Bride of Frankenstein with the ribbons that were also reminiscent of the bandages of the Creature. That dress is made up of I think about six layers. When you open it up, it’s almost like a filleted skin in itself. We kept externalizing the layers so that the final layer is the most transparent organza that we used, but it looked almost like an x-ray of a dress. All the details and construction of the dress were there, but it wasn’t evident until the blood came through. Then it became a piece of anatomy.”

Costume designer Kate Hawley has more images of her work for this film on Instagram. Check it out!

 

 

Have you seen this version of Frankenstein?

 

 

 

 

Find this frock flick at: