“Of all the Parts That Make That man, Which is the one That Holds the Soul?”
DIRECTED BY GUILLERMO DEL TORO/2025
Right before he begins his tale of horror and sorrow that will explain how he ended up a man stranded in the middle of the Arctic and on the verge of death, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) states to his audience – the stern Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelson)- “Some of what I will tell is fact. Some is not, but it is all true.”
This line opens up a number of engaging interpretations; In a literal sense, Victor’s story will play upon the framing device of the unreliable narrator. But on a metatextual level, writer-director Guillermo del Toro prepares his own audience with a self-aware notion that his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s monumental work of science fiction and gothic literature, his Frankenstein, will be a parallel to her novel. Some of it is 1-to-1 with the book, others an artistic choice to establish his own voice and ideas (as well as being inspired by the countless other adaptations made in the wake of her creation), but it is all true to the idea of Frankenstein.
Obviously, his version isn’t the first to either veer off into its own direction or try to stay true to the book. The reason Frankenstein has captivated the minds of artists and readers for 200 years since its publication is that it leaves a variety of themes embedded within its seemingly simple story that are just begging to be dug out. While directors like Kenneth Branagh attempted to stay true to Shelley, James Whale’s 1931 adaptation, while on the surface pushing the novel’s moralistic take on playing God and perverting the ways of science, is also a much-studied depiction of the Creature that has been likened to Queer Theory and the director’s experience serving during WWI. Paul Morissey played with the novel’s implications of eugenics and Victor’s upper-class privilege in his 70s euro-horror camp film Flesh for Frankenstein. Bomani J. Story applies the Creature’s role of the Other towards the Black experience in The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. Writer Alasdair Grey gender-swapped the Creature and turned the story into a social satire about men controlling women in his novel Poor Things, later adapted by Yorgos Lanthimos. And right after this adaptation, Maggie Gyllenhaal will reimagine Frankenstein’s monster and the Bride of Frankenstein as a Bonnie and Clyde duo in The Bride! while Radu Jude is preparing a version of Frankenstein set at a CIA prison in Romania. Safe to say, there have been several people who all had different ideas of what the truth behind Shelley’s novel is, making it an even bigger question of what del Toro’s truth is in comparison. Sadly, it is not one as fascinating as the rest.
Following the same structure of the book, Victor recounts his life full of tragedy, stemming from losing his mother early in life, becoming obsessed with the possibility of resurrection, to then the horrific aftermath of making said hypothetical a reality. And while it is appreciative of del Toro to keep to the story’s structure, his idea of Frankenstein contradicts with his devotion to Mary Shelley. Writing with the same genre conventions of contemporary melodrama, del Toro’s main focus is on the role of parenting, starting by contextualizing Victor’s desire for artificial reproduction as a possible traumatic response from his mother Claire’s (Mia Goth) death in childbirth and the abuse from his strict, heartless physician father (Charles Dance). And once this Promethean figure creates his fire, del Toro switches the book’s events of Victor being horrified by his creation and abandoning it with Victor developing a father-son relationship with his Creature (Jacob Elordi) that quickly turns abusive.
While it definitely isn’t the only version featuring this dynamic between a creator and his creation, when compared to other adaptations, there is a strange simplicity to what del Toro is doing. Fitting the Frankenstein story within his brand of Gothic adult fairy tales, it has all the usual tropes he brings into all his films. There’s the sympathetic monster, a villainous authority figure representing the monstrosity of humanity (in this case two versions- Victor and a character del Toro made up, the arms manufacturer/Victor’s money ticket for his experiment Henreich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a woman who shows love and compassion towards the monster -the “love interest” Elizabeth (Mia Goth)- and brutish violence to contrast his whimsically beautifulworlds. While this welding between del Toro’s storytelling and Mary Shelley’s book can lead to some interesting insight, most of the time it only brings out the worst in everyone’s favorite auteur.
For one, del Toro’s knack for simplified narratives and emotional storytelling doesn’t fare well with the complex writing of Shelley. Victor’s antagonistic nature is shown clear to the point of committing the more villainous acts the Creature caused in the book. Despite Isaac’s best efforts in creating some nuance for his role, Victor’s one-noted unpleasantry doesn’t have much ground for a vulnerable side. The double-casting of Goth as Victor’s mother and his brother William’s (Felix Kammerer) fiance is an interesting idea, only to realize that it is del Toro sanitizing the incestuous nature of Victor and Elizabeth’s relationship in the novel, while also leaving the latter as nothing more than a tailor-made foil to the mad scientist and a loving, maternal figure to his monster, designed to be a step in the two characters’ development. As he depicts Victor’s side of the story, del Toro somehow has trouble finding any humanity in his characters, becoming archetypes to an end to get to the character he cared the most for.
Del Toro’s fascination and devotion to the Creature is made explicitly clear. His grotesque design instead gives into marble-statue-esque beauty and his less violent characterization provides him an innocence that leads to the monster being the most interesting character out of the main cast (as well as automatically giving Elordi something to work with, providing the film’s best performance by a mile). Once the film switches over to the Creature’s perspective, it starts to come alive and provide a beating pathos that was sorely missing. But the presentation provides mixed results; while the design of the Creature can be off-putting at first, it ends up working in the film’s favor to provide the function of the Creature. Conceived as a parody of human nature, a being manufactured in an industrial age, the Creature’s clean, beautiful nature gives contrast to the bloody, violent world he is born into. While all the other adaptations imagine the character to be a grotesque monstrosity to differentiate it from the natural world, del Toro doing the opposite is a pretty fresh take. However, through portraying the Creature as a victim, the film robs him of the ugliness that has made him such an iconic figure in the centuries since he was created. He doesn’t intentionally kill any of the characters, differing from his plan to destroy Victor’s family in the novel. His anger and bitterness towards his creator is more moody instead of vicious, his sympathy forcing an easy narrative for audiences to follow instead of allowing some level of complexity to shape del Toro’s version of the monster. The best example of his borderline infantilization of the Creature is in how he’s set up before his birth, propped up on a platform as if going through crucifixion, being born through humanity’s sins. This monster-as-Christ statement could’ve led to some significance, but in del Toro’s hands it ends up feeling rote. In the writer-director’s mind, the only faults are of the father, and the only role the son can play is the victim, and nothing else.
What doesn’t help distract from del Toro’s flatter retelling of Frankenstein is how noticeably his cinematic style falters with him tackling his material. All shot on wide lenses and digital, his attempts at finding the fantastical in the story’s darkness only becomes repetitive and navel-gazey. Dan Lausten’s camerawork, despite working well in del Toro’s other films Nightmare Alley and Shape of Water, is at its most unimaginative; almost every single shot is a wide angle dolly, the camera awkwardly floating through an overly-lit, CGI-laden world that only brings out the ugliness seen in an auteur working his signature style to death. And while Evan Schiff’s editing keeps the film at a consistent pace throughout its bloated 150-minute runtime, and Kate Hawley’s costume designs give some fun in its excessively detailed period dressing (she deserved that Oscar for thinking of giving Victor those cunty red leather gloves), Frankenstein only proves to be a fruitless endeavor in finding something new to explore in retelling the story, partly because of the Netflix in the room.
The thing that truly makes this misfire so mind-boggling is how the studio was so mistrusting of an Oscar-winning director that they thought applying the much-criticized tropes of their movies into an already unsubtle artist’s work would make it more appealing. One of the biggest flaws in the film, besides the simplified story and neutered mise-en-scene, is in how thuddingly obvious the dialogue is. Every plot point, every theme, every character motivation is outwardly explained, shoehorned into scenes that makes it convenient for people finding whatever’s on their phones more interesting to watch. Oftentimes it reaches the point of parody, having Victor explain the obvious parallels between his search for ridding the world of death and Captain Anderson’s desire to explore the Arctic despite an angered crew, dwindling supplies, and freezing temperatures marking them for failure, or in having a character call the mad scientist “the real monster” before dying in his arms. By the time it gets to the end, with the Creature learning to move on from his trauma and torment, del Toro makes sure to exposit this extremely subtle development via the film’s biggest punchline, ending the film on a Lord Byron quote explaining the point of its conclusion.
It’s incredible how in trying to be one of the ultimate Frankenstein adaptations, through doing its own thing while taking so much from the book, it often ventures into not capturing anything at all. What it lifts from the established work only reminds of the underlying questions and narratives embedded in the text, a commentary that managed to be studied and celebrated for centuries, that is then flattened or ignored to provide a conveniently non-transgressive work. There is no provocation; no subverting or connections to issues that were as relevant in 1818 as they are now (the closest the film gets to this is the comparison to the Creature and its unnatural process being a symbol of AI technology, an interesting thought that doesn’t go anywhere in the story). All that Guillermo del Toro is interested in is providing a film to sympathize, matching with his truth that Frankenstein is a Miltonian tale of a wronged monster. If only his truth wasn’t so flanderized.