If Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a Gothic tragedy about man playing God, then Bernard Rose’s 2015 Frankenstein is the fever dream of a god who watched too many TED Talks about “disruptive innovation.” It’s smart, sad, violent, beautiful, and bleakly hilarious—all the things you’d expect when a self-aware corpse gets dumped into modern Los Angeles.
Directed by Bernard Rose (Candyman himself, the patron saint of poetic horror), this isn’t your father’s Frankenstein movie—unless your father’s into body horror, nihilism, and Carrie-Anne Moss explaining bioengineering with the same calm tone she uses to tell Neo to dodge bullets.
It’s Frankenstein for the selfie generation: raw, weirdly touching, and dripping with dark humor about humanity’s talent for screwing up everything it touches.
1. Meet Adam: The Handsomest Corpse in California
Forget the lumbering, bolt-necked monster of old. Rose’s creature, played by Xavier Samuel, starts out as an unnervingly beautiful man-child—sort of like a Calvin Klein ad resurrected from the dead. He wakes up naked, blinking under fluorescent lab lights, to find that his creators—Victor (Danny Huston, channeling “tech bro who thinks God is a start-up idea”) and Elizabeth (Carrie-Anne Moss, the scientist-mom every abomination deserves)—are very proud of themselves.
At least, until Adam’s perfect flesh starts to decay faster than an iPhone battery. Within hours, he’s gone from “cover model” to “meatloaf in a hoodie.”
When Victor tries to mercy-kill his creation with a chemical cocktail, Adam reacts with a primal scream that says, “I did not sign up for this clinical trial!” Victor’s Plan B—manual strangulation—goes about as well as you’d expect from a man whose PhD is in hubris.
Adam wakes up mid-autopsy, kills his makers’ lab assistants, and escapes into the world like an angry newborn covered in afterbirth and trauma.
2. Welcome to Los Angeles, You Beautiful Disaster
Our freshly minted monster staggers through the city, confused, childlike, and covered in scars. He’s a newborn with the strength of a forklift and the emotional intelligence of a toaster.
When he befriends a stray dog, it’s oddly touching. When he accidentally drowns a little girl while playing “fetch the stick,” it’s horrifying—and darkly funny in a “you tried your best, buddy” kind of way.
Police arrive, shoot his dog (because of course they do), and call him a monster. Adam’s reaction? Rage, grief, and a very thorough police beatdown. For the first time, you realize Shelley’s themes still hit hard in 2015: the real monsters are the ones with badges, not stitches.
You could call this a modern allegory of violence and alienation. Or you could just admit it’s emotionally devastating to watch a reanimated corpse get ghosted by humanity before he’s even had lunch.
3. “Monster” Becomes His Legal Name
Dragged to the police station in a straitjacket, Adam is asked his name. “Monster,” he says—because society has labeled him faster than Twitter cancels a celebrity. When he gives the cops Elizabeth’s ID badge and calls her “Mom,” she’s summoned, sees him, and immediately denies everything like she’s in a bad custody hearing.
It’s one of the film’s bleakest—and funniest—moments. Imagine being created in a lab, abandoned, shot, beaten, and rejected by your own “mother,” all before dinner. No wonder the guy’s social skills need work.
The cops later dump him in an alley and shoot him in the head, because apparently this department skipped “due process” and went straight to “execution.” Yet Adam survives. Say what you will about his looks—he’s built like a tank.
4. Tony Todd Saves the Movie (and the Monster’s Soul)
Just when Frankenstein risks collapsing under its own misery, in walks Tony Todd as Eddie—a blind homeless man who takes Adam in like a streetwise guardian angel. It’s the film’s heart, and Todd plays it with quiet warmth and dignity.
Eddie teaches Adam to speak, to smile, to understand humanity. Unfortunately, what Adam learns is that humanity is a scam. Eddie’s kindness is the one shining light in a world full of cruelty. Which, of course, means he won’t live long.
Their bond is sweet, funny, and tragic. When Eddie scolds Adam for scaring people, you can feel both fatherly frustration and existential exhaustion. He’s not afraid of Adam’s face; he’s afraid of what it reflects.
And then—because Adam is cursed with the subtlety of a wrecking ball—he accidentally kills Eddie in a moment of panic. At this point, Adam’s life is basically a cosmic blooper reel of tragedy.
5. Sex, Horror, and Existential Despair
Eddie, trying to give Adam a semblance of normal human experience, convinces a prostitute, Wanda (Maya Erskine), to sleep with him.
It’s one of those scenes that starts awkward and ends catastrophic—kind of like Tinder dates, but with more spinal fractures. Wanda sees Adam’s grotesque body after his shower, freaks out, and tries to leave. In his desperation not to be abandoned again, Adam accidentally kills her.
You could read it as a metaphor for man’s inability to handle intimacy—or as a PSA against letting emotionally unstable corpses book hotel rooms.
6. The Revenge Road Trip Nobody Asked For
Now completely unhinged, Adam grabs Wanda’s phone, uses GPS like a pro, and sets out for revenge against his creators. It’s Frankenstein’s Uber Odyssey, featuring road rage, body count, and traffic violations.
On the way, he encounters the same cop who shot him in the head. The reunion is short and ends with a bullet to the face. Adam’s moral compass is long gone, but to be fair, so is his frontal lobe.
When he finally finds Victor and Elizabeth in their gleaming modernist mansion, the confrontation is everything you’d expect from an AI ethics seminar gone wrong: shouting, syringes, accidental decapitation, and self-immolation.
Elizabeth dies by Victor’s hand (oops), Victor flees, and Adam—realizing that everything he loves either runs away or dies—decides to end the experiment himself. He burns both her body and his own, crying out one final line that’s oddly moving for a man made from spare parts:
“I am Adam.”
It’s the most heartbreaking identity crisis since The Bachelor finale.
7. Bernard Rose: The Poet of Pain
Rose directs with the same elegance he brought to Candyman, balancing beauty and horror like a mad sculptor carving tragedy into flesh. His Frankenstein isn’t about monsters—it’s about mirrors. Every cruelty Adam suffers reflects our own obsession with perfection, control, and discarding what we can’t understand.
The gore is clinical, the violence intimate. Even when the film dips into melodrama (and oh, it does), it’s anchored by sincerity. Rose doesn’t wink or flinch—he dares you to stare at the ugliness of creation.
Also, he stages dismemberment scenes with the precision of a man who’s seen too many art films and thought, “Needs more spleen.”
8. Xavier Samuel’s Meltdown of the Year
Samuel gives a performance that’s both physically intense and emotionally naked. He starts off with the wide-eyed innocence of a child and ends as a snarling, self-aware monster. Watching him decay—inside and out—is equal parts horrifying and heartbreaking.
By the time he’s screaming “MOM!” while covered in blood, you don’t know whether to cry, laugh, or call a therapist.
9. Humanity: Still the Worst Monster in the Room
Rose’s biggest twist isn’t that Frankenstein’s monster learns about cruelty—it’s that he learns it so quickly. Humans, it turns out, don’t need bolts or labs to be monstrous. They come pre-assembled.
In a world obsessed with beauty, perfection, and control, Adam’s crumbling body becomes a walking indictment of vanity itself. He’s not a monster because he’s ugly. He’s a monster because he learned from us.
10. Final Thoughts: A Beautiful, Brutal Tragedy
Frankenstein (2015) is messy, haunting, and darkly funny in the way only a modern tragedy about science and loneliness can be. It’s equal parts philosophy lecture and horror show, where the punchline is always: “We had it coming.”
Bernard Rose reimagines Shelley’s masterpiece for a world of selfies, biotech, and moral decay—and somehow makes it hurt all over again.
It’s not subtle. It’s not easy. But it’s alive—horribly, wonderfully alive.
Rating: 9/10 — A masterpiece of modern misery. Come for the body horror, stay for the existential dread, leave wondering why you suddenly feel bad for a man made of spare parts.
