Jacob Elordi’s ‘Frankenstein’ on Netflix: A Bold, Lyrical Reanimation for 2025

Guillermo del Toro’s long-nurtured Frankenstein has finally lurched from dream to screen, arriving on Netflix just days after a limited theatrical bow—and the conversation hasn’t stopped since. The film reframes Mary Shelley’s classic as a sweeping Gothic drama about creation, exploitation, and the cost of trying to outpace mortality. With Jacob Elordi embodying the Creature in a physically transformative turn and Oscar Isaac as a haunted, hubristic Victor, this is a prestige monster movie with blood in its veins and poetry in its marrow.

Frankenstein 2025: Release, Story, and What’s New

Set largely amid the chaos and profiteering of mid-19th-century Europe, Frankenstein (2025) follows Victor Frankenstein’s renegade experiments as they collide with war, industry, and grief. The streaming debut on November 7 caps a roll-out designed to be both eventful and accessible: a theatrical taste for big-screen immersion, then a swift pivot to the living room where the film’s operatic emotions and meticulous design invite multiple viewings.

What’s different this time isn’t just the scale; it’s the approach. Del Toro leans into Shelley’s Romanticism—the windswept longing, the moral ambiguity—while foregrounding the Creature’s subjectivity. The monster is not a lumbering punchline but an aching presence, an “alabaster” figure whose stitched-together body mirrors a stitched-together identity.

Jacob Elordi’s Creature: A Performance Built from Pain and Precision

Elordi’s portrayal is the film’s pulse. Reports from the production detail marathon makeup sessions and an emphasis on movement: elongated, deliberate, almost balletic. On screen, that work translates into a being who is frightening because he is so new—raw-skinned, wide-eyed, confused by the tyranny of sensation. The performance toggles between feral survival and fragile grace, making the Creature sympathetic without declawing his danger.

Crucially, the film trusts Elordi with silence. His listening—how he takes in music, faces, cruelty—does as much storytelling as any line of dialogue. It’s a reminder that Shelley’s creation is first a child of the world before he becomes its scourge.

Victor Frankenstein and the Human Machinery

As Victor, Oscar Isaac plays a man possessed by the idea that suffering can be reverse-engineered into salvation. The character’s arc is not a cautionary poster about “playing God,” but a study in how ambition curdles when it outgrows accountability. Around him, a finely cast ensemble fills in a society eager to monetize miracles: Mia Goth with flinty elegance, Christoph Waltz with velvet menace, and a gallery of faces that give the film its political texture—soldiers, financiers, and bystanders who benefit from death while denying complicity in it.

How Del Toro Honors—and Deviates From—Mary Shelley

Shelley’s novel remains the film’s spine: the Creature’s plea to be seen, the creator’s flight from responsibility, the wintry chase toward self-annihilation. Del Toro adds two major inflections. First, the historical frame sharpens the story’s critique of power; bodies are commodities, and resurrection is just another industry if money is involved. Second, the aesthetic is Romantic to the hilt—stormlight on ice, velvet shadows, candlelit laboratories that feel both sacred and profane. Rather than replicate the iconic square-headed silhouette popularized by earlier cinema, the Creature’s look is closer to Shelley’s text—gaunt, pallid, unsettlingly beautiful.

Craft Notes: Why It Looks and Sounds This Way

• Design & Makeup: The Creature’s prosthetics create subtle asymmetries and translucent skin tones, evoking carved marble streaked with living veins. It’s sculpture as character work.

• Cinematography: Grand, gliding camera moves and crisp, high-contrast interiors let fabrics, metal, and bone glow or wither depending on moral temperature.

• Music: A lush, mournful score underlines the film’s aching romanticism, punctuating moments where tenderness curdles into terror.

Cast of ‘Frankenstein’ 2025 (Key Roles)

• Jacob Elordi — The Creature

• Oscar Isaac — Victor Frankenstein

• Mia Goth — A pivotal figure entwined with Victor’s family and fate

• Christoph Waltz — A powerful patron with hidden costs

• Featured players include Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, Christian Convery, and Charles Dance.

Should You Stream It Now?

If you come to Frankenstein for shocks, you’ll find them; but what lingers is sorrow. The film argues that monsters are often manufactured by the same systems that pretend to abhor them. It’s visually sumptuous, emotionally upfront, and steeped in the author’s original questions about agency, empathy, and the ethics of making life. With its arrival on Netflix, the conversation is only intensifying—about performance, about fidelity to Shelley, and about how to resurrect a myth without embalming it.

For fans of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, of del Toro’s Gothic romanticism, or of actors stretching into landmark roles, this 2025 reanimation is appointment viewing—alive, moaning, and, at times, transcendent.