“My maker told his tale… and I will tell you mine.”
So opens the thunderous new trailer for Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s long-dreamed descent into Mary Shelley’s gothic underworld, and what a staggering descent it is. With just a few breathless words from the Creature himself, the trailer unfurls like a mournful soliloquy torn from the grave, promising a tale not merely retold, but reborn.
The trailer is an elegy soaked in shadow and snow, a dirge of regret, rage, and haunted memory. Through the Creature’s voice, fractured, yearning, furious, we step into a broken recollection of his cursed existence. “I remember… pieces. Memories of different men.” The line lands like a whisper through a cracked cathedral, revealing a monster not stitched together merely by flesh, but by trauma. He is not just a creation; he is a mosaic of sorrow.
Then comes the name. Victor Frankenstein. Spoken not with reverence, but with the weight of accusation and ancient betrayal. Oscar Isaac, as the doomed alchemist of life and death, looms large even in brief glimpses, proud, brilliant, and inevitably damned. But it is Jacob Elordi’s Creature, gaunt and ghostlike, who commands the screen, his eyes filled with the terrible clarity of the abandoned.
Visually, del Toro conjures a fever dream of crumbling castles, flickering candlelight, and snow-laced ruin, where beauty and horror walk hand in hand. The production design pulses with life and death, a baroque theatre of monstrosity. But beneath the grotesque, there is poetry.
The most piercing moment? “If you are not to award me love… then I will indulge in rage.”
The line, delivered with quiet devastation, seals the film’s promise: this is not horror for horror’s sake. It is the horror of the heart, twisted by loneliness, inflamed by rejection.
And then — “Now, run.”
A final command, cold as a tombstone, hot as vengeance.
In a mere two minutes, del Toro makes it thunderously clear: Frankenstein is not just a film. It is a requiem for the forgotten, a fevered hymn to monstrosity, and a searing return to the soul of Shelley’s immortal tale.
