Advertised as a chiller, this film turns out to be something else, having a lot of jollification, nice fancy, elegant mounting -- there is, in short, beauty as well as the beast.

Screenwriters Hurlbut & Balderston and Director James Whale have given it the macabre intensity proper to all good horror pieces, but have substituted a queer kind of mechanistic pathos for the sheer evil that was Frankenstein.

Whale's erudite genius brings it all together. He sculpts every nuance of self-parody, social satire, horror, humour, wit and whimsy into a dazzling whole, keeping every one of his fantastical plates spinning until the tragic, inevitable finale.

A sequel in which Whale attempts to expand the scope with Boris Karloff and Gothic atmospheres, yet the horror narrative is not immune to its own uneven flaws. [Full review in Spanish]