Frankenstein (2025)

It's gorgeous to contemplate from beginning to end and the entertainment levels are just about comparably unwavering.

And I suppose it deserves a little extra support from us here as it stars the world's second most famous Guatemalan...still, I think, sandwiched between the two Arjonas in that respect.

BUT...

And I know I am going to piss some people off when I say this — some of the same people who were noticeably outraged last week when Nawat Itsaragrisil committed professional suicide via media and Mexican righteous indignation at the Miss Universe event — when I observe that one of the issues I perhaps have with Guillermo's vision is its overtly 'Mexican' sensibility.

What do I mean by this? First of all there is the almost ludicrously stylised representation of European history around the turn of the nineteenth century.

Then there is a tendency — one I also noted in Guillermo Arriaga's recent bestseller Extrañas, set in a largely similar time and place — to add layers and layers of story to the point that they tend to smother the meaning of the narrative.

I have no precise idea why Mexicans like to do this, but I will go out on a limb here — and this is where some offence may be taken — and suggest it is because they all grow up watching telenovelas. (Roman Catholicism may, or may not, also have something to do with this.)

At times I found myself hankering a bit for del Toro's more youthful and budget-constrained output (Pan's Labyrinth, El Espinazo...) for there are definitely moments when it all gets a bit OTT. Those CGI wolves reminded me of the issues I had with Ridley's Gladiator sequel.

And it sure doesn't help that everyone seems to be performing with a pastiche accent...though in the case of Waltz that seems to come as part of the basic package.

I am not an expert on the lore — having only really read the novel and watched the comedy take in Young Frankenstein — but I cannot fully grasp what the writer-director was up to when he re-imagined the other three main human characters in the story. All of them are barely half-realised.

Mia Goth's Elizabeth is a particularly wasted opportunity, given the significance of Mary Shelley and her mum to the women's movement in Britain. In her first scene she looks as if she is going to be a mouthpiece for some interesting perspectives, but we will soon be disappointed and even then, at the dinner table, the most fascinating thing about her is what she's wearing on her head.

It's more easy to understand why del Toro chose to make the 'monster' morally more blameless, and Jacob Elordi's performance is one of the best things in the film. Of his maker, the director said he wanted to show us the kind of emblematic human who could be good before breakfast and bad after it, but I have to say that in the end I found his Frankenstein 'good in places' and not entirely coherent, which is not the same thing.