Tags: blog, film, horror, recommended, 2025

Date: Monday December 29th, 2025

Victor was not a 'Tech Bro', ok?

A room with gothic architecture, lit by the sun pouring through a huge round window. The floor is covered with leaves, a skylight in the ceiling is encrusted with ivy. There's a massive circular hole in the floor and we see a the back of a man looking at it.

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is, I think, the most considered film I've ever seen. The amount of care and attention is overwhelming, pause the film at any point and everything is there for a reason. Every item in the camera frame, every plot point, every camera angle, every costume, every musical beat, every word of every line of dialogue, everything, everything, everything is there because someone who is a master of their craft wanted it to be just so.

And yet... I'm sorry, I'm going to spend most of the review of a fantastic film criticising it. I've spent a month trying to write a review where I didn't do exactly this, but I've failed miserably, so here we are.

And yet... No matter how hard del Toro tries to inject everything possible into this movie, to push everything to the limit in order to jolt us out of just how comfortable we have become with the legend of Frankenstein, you always feel like there are conventions here that just won't be stepped over.

For me, Guillermo del Toro's best films¹ are the ones where there's a sensation that he's not quite playing by the rules. That everything's taken a wrong turn a way back, you're not sure where, and now you can't find your way out again.

The scene where the Pale Man wakes up in Pan's Labyrinth makes your stomach turn cold because none of this is supposed to happen like that. But you've invested yourself in this and, just like Ofelia, you can't back out of it now.

So yes, the film is overwhelming. Richly, grandiosely, beautifully, horrifically so, but it never gets under your skin.

Another criticism I have is that, contrary to many opinions on the internet, I don't think the story of Victor Frankenstein resonates in our current age. For instance, this review from the excellent Blood In The Machine makes the same mistake that Guillermo del Toro makes, which is drawing parallels between Victor and today's tech bros. And, to be fair, those parallels are astute and well drawn. But the basic problem is that whilst Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg and Frankenstein are fanatical arseholes, Frankenstein is also a genius. None of our Tech oligarchs are smarter than the average caller to LBC Radio.

Trying to conflate a man who discovered the secret to creating life out of dead flesh to the man who bought twitter by accident doesn't seem right to me. These people don't create anything, they just spend and buy. If they were in this movie, they'd be Harlander. I think most of those personality-free middle-managers-who-got-exceptionally-lucky would actually quite like being compared to Frankenstein.

So what I'm left with is an exceptional film, that floods the senses with how extra it is, but never quite felt dangerous enough to truly shake me.

An absolutely sumptuous still shot of a woman in a nineteenth century, azure blue dress, layered with chiffon. She's holding a human skull and looking at it intensely. The room is filled with baroque artwork, furniture and curtains.

Poster Credit Where to Watch

1. And for the record my favourites are: The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy 2 and Nightmare Alley
↩