Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” Details the Consequences of Being an Imitation God

Adapting a classic into a feature-length film is often a daunting climb for filmmakers. 

 

There is the pressure to honor the original source while reimagining it for a contemporary audience. There is the doom of diehard fans who may discard the new work before it marinates. And there is the ever-present gaze of critics who can make or break a film. Guillermo del Toro, one of cinema’s most meticulous mythmakers, must have felt all of these eyes on him while working on Frankenstein, his not-so-faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic horror novel.

 

As expected, del Toro grounds his film in Shelley’s timeless arc: a scientist so obsessed with defeating death that he transgresses nature’s limits to animate a patchwork body of corpses. Also expected are the decisive stylistic and thematic shifts that unmistakably bear his signature. He moves the story slightly forward into the Victorian era, amid the Crimean War, a period whose grim surplus of cadavers proves morbidly useful for Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). The director also happily indulges in the era’s saturated colors and ornate environments, a palette he and his team render with painterly precision.

 

Across three parts, del Toro turns the famed story on its axis and offers a tale rich with sympathy, redemption, and the consequences of unchecked ambition. For centuries, the monster has been portrayed as a being without emotion, killing at will with no reverence for life. Del Toro rejects that narrative entirely.

 

In the film’s Prologue, Victor is painted as a remarkable child devoted to his mother but resentful of his father, a baron and respected surgeon who abused him physically and emotionally. The baron hoped Victor would follow in his footsteps to preserve the family legacy, and Victor eventually did. Yet respect was far from his reach. Determined to prove his worth, he became obsessed with ideas far larger than life itself.

 

By Victor’s Tale, he has fully embraced a godlike persona, attempting to create life from death, an act his peers label an abomination. With funding from his soon-to-be in-law Harlander (Christoph Waltz), the typical suave and predatory financier who feigns patronage but only truly seeks leverage, Victor retreats to a tower. There, surrounded by machinery and cadavers, he commits to creating a new being. After repeated failures, one stormy night grants him success. The Creature (Jacob Elordi) is born, and so is Victor’s undoing.

 

The character of Victor is fascinating because any man who dares to play God should never consider himself infallible. He went on and on about the supposed flaw in his research because The Creature was, in his view, unintelligent. Yet he failed to recognize the glaring flaws in himself.

 

For one, he was never patient. Intelligence is learned, not innate, but he never gave The Creature a chance to actually be before discarding him as a lost cause and attempting to kill him. Second, Victor becomes the exact embodiment of his abusive father. For all intents and purposes, The Creature was his child, yet he abused him: yelling at him unnecessarily, chaining him, striking him with whips, confining him to the basement towers without food or water, and denying him any human interaction. Frankenstein reeks of daddy issues, from a young Frankenstein himself whose father rarely hesitated to cane him in the face for something as trivial as an academic lapse, to the Creature whose impatient creator berates him for a supposed lack of intelligence. Victor continues the cycle he was supposed to break. Patterns are hard to escape, and the apple rarely falls far from the tree.

 

Third, Victor lacks accountability, a flaw Elizabeth (Mia Goth), his brother’s fiancée and the woman he harbors feelings for, quickly identifies. He never admits to causing Harlander’s death. He blames The Creature instead. He shoots Elizabeth on her wedding day, and yet again he finds it convenient to shift the blame. He avoids taking responsibility for the horrors he commits, earning The Creature’s resentment in the process. His only redeeming moment comes minutes before his death on the ship, when he finally asks The Creature for forgiveness. Only in death does he acknowledge him as “my son.”

 

What is most unnerving about Victor’s unhinged nature is that he doesn’t go to hell alone; he drags his family with him. Elizabeth, William (Felix Kammerer), and Harlander are all casualties of his madness. Before William’s death, he tells Victor, “You are the monster,” and he is absolutely right. Alongside Harlander, Victor embodies everything that is corrupting and corrosive in the film’s world: ambition for ambition’s sake. If there were a film villain-of-the-year award, Victor would claim it without contest.

 

More remarkable still is del Toro’s revision of the Creature, whom he treats with a previously unafforded level of dignity and empathy. He shades him with purity of heart, a tall and elegant build wrapped in bluish-green hues (not unlike del Toro’s own amphibious creature in 2017’s The Shape of Water), and, most importantly, narrative voice. By letting the Creature narrate parts of his own story, the film reframes him not as a brute but as a soul seeking understanding.

 

The Creature’s Tale, the second act, makes Victor’s cruelty undeniable. After surviving Victor’s attempt on his life, The Creature learns to fend for himself. He takes refuge on a farm and slowly acquires human qualities: survival instinct, intelligence, and appreciation for beauty. The farm’s patriarch calls him “The Spirit of the Forest” and teaches him how to speak, read, and understand the world. He offers patience, understanding, and kindness, everything Victor never did. Sometimes strangers show you the love family denies, and there is nothing more painfully ironic than that.

 

In contrast to Shelley’s original characterization, where the Creature is burdened with murderous instinct, del Toro’s version is profoundly pacifist. The Creature has no natural inclination toward violence; every act of violence he commits is a response to the hostility of the world around him. He is only violent when provoked, and most of his rage is reserved for Victor.

 

This central inversion becomes the film’s moral spine: the man behaves monstrously, while the so-called monster exhibits the soul of a man. The Creature emerges as the true victim here: born without consent, denied affection, and subjected to the scorn of war-hungry, self-important men. Victor, consumed by his obsession with perfection, offers his creation not a moment’s grace. Yet the so-called “unintelligent” being he rejects is the one who approaches the world with curiosity, compassion, and the capacity to hesitate where others rush to harm.

 

His requests are heartbreakingly simple: a wife and an end to his life. In a pseudo-biblical moment, he asks for a companion, “another monster,” to ease his loneliness. Victor refuses. When The Creature asks for death instead, he refuses that too. Selfishness is Victor’s defining trait. He later urges The Creature to live if he cannot die, forgetting the obvious: The Creature has nothing left to live for. His adopted family is gone, and now Victor too. The final scene captures the horror of a being cursed to walk the earth alone.

 

Visually, Frankenstein is del Toro in peak form. Working with production designer Tamara Deverell, cinematographer Dan Laustsen, and costume designer Kate Hawley, he creates a world that is both grand and tactile. Victor’s tower is a dark cathedral of horror filled with machinery, corpses, and blood, a stunning tribute to classic gothic imagery. Windswept coastlines and sweeping oceanside cliffs meet a meticulously realized Scottish castle-laboratory. There’s even a Danish ship built from scratch. Nearly everything looks hand-crafted, a nod to the detail Shelley imagined in her novel, albeit with a modern twist. Del Toro, a lifelong student of the genre, proves once again that he understands the gothic arts more intimately than most.

 

The cast of Frankenstein is small, but that intimacy strengthens the film’s emotional impact. Oscar Isaac delivers Victor with feverish intensity, embodying every twitch and whisper of a man consumed by obsession. Though for all the director’s ingenuity elsewhere, the character remains largely unchanged within the broader Frankenstein canon. Mia Goth’s Elizabeth radiates intelligence and grace, and her chemistry with Isaac, especially in their intellectual spats, adds texture to their doomed relationship.

 

But the undeniable standout is Jacob Elordi. He brings aching humanity to a character long condemned to irredeemable monstrosity. This is his boldest work yet. To emerge as the Creature, Elordi sat for 11 hours daily as 42 individual silicone pieces were added. From his voice to his roars to his devastating emotional restraint, he disappears into The Creature. Awards bodies, you have a Best Actor contender.

 

Frankenstein raises urgent philosophical questions. Who is the real monster, Victor or The Creature? If death can give life, then what is the point of either? What becomes of a life with no purpose? And why should any madman be allowed to play God? The answer to that last question is brutally clear: only a monster can attempt to be God, and often the monster is not the one we expect.

 

This cocktail of romance, horror, and mythic fantasy mirrors the patchwork nature of Frankenstein’s monster, though this particular assemblage emerges far more unified and alive. The film forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that monsters are often made, not born. It holds a mirror to the arrogance of creators who refuse accountability and to the forgotten beings left in the wreckage of their ambition. In its quietest moments, the film asks who deserves compassion and who truly deserves fear.

 

In answering that, Frankenstein becomes more than an adaptation. It becomes a reminder that some stories return every generation not because they are old, but because we still haven’t learned. Quite a pity it’s not given a broader and longer-lasting theater-wide release.

 

Release Date: August 30, 2025 (Venice Film Festival); November 7, 2025 (Netflix)  

Runtime: 2 hours 50 minutes  

Streaming Service: Netflix  

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro  

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, David Bradley, Lars Mikkelsen, Charles Dance