There are some stories that feel less like fiction and more like mirrors held up to our oldest fears and most fragile desires. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of them. Two centuries after its publication, the book refuses to loosen its grip on us, resurfacing in film after film, each director trying to answer the question Shelley posed so sharply. What do we owe our creations? What do we owe the vulnerable things we bring into a world that is already cruel? Guillermo del Toro has spent most of his artistic life circling that question, and his new cinematic adaptation finally dives into it with both hands. It arrives like a long awaited confession. The result is a film that is lush, wounded, often brutal, and strangely hopeful, a vision that honours Shelley's philosophical bones while draping them in del Toro's unmistakable flesh.
This story begins, as it always does, with a man who believed he could conquer death. But del Toro shifts the frame from eighteenth century Switzerland to the Victorian era, allowing the world around Victor Frankenstein to be bigger, stranger, and edged with the early machinery of modern science. The rearranging of history never feels like an intrusion. It is closer to a quiet admission that this story lives outside linear time anyway. Shelley's novel was already stitched together from many influences. It quoted Milton. It argued with Greek myth. It borrowed from philosophy and the anxieties of the industrial revolution. Del Toro simply keeps this tradition of remixing alive, bending the narrative toward his own lifelong obsessions. The film opens in the frozen quiet of the North Pole, where a ship's crew discovers Victor drifting on the ice, battered and delirious. Oscar Isaac plays him with a slippery intensity that reveals a man who has convinced himself his brilliance excuses everything. In Shelley's book, Victor is already a bundle of nerves, all moral frailty and melodrama. Del Toro sharpens that portrayal into something uglier. His Victor is charismatic when it suits him and vicious when it does not. He toggles between self pity and cruelty with unnerving ease. This is a man who wanted to create life not out of altruism but out of ego. The film never lets him forget it.
When the story folds back into Victor's past, the tone shifts from gothic drama to something more intimate and unsettling. Victor's grief over his mother's death becomes the spark that ignites his obsession with reanimation. Devastated by mortality, he wants to defy the natural order and accidentally positions himself as a grim facsimile of God. Christoph Waltz appears as Harlander, an arms dealer who funds Victor's experiments, and Mia Goth's Elizabeth enlivens the world around them with that hypnotic blend of innocence and menace she has perfected. The film's atmosphere is richly embroidered with colour. Jewel toned costumes shimmer with almost violent intensity. It is the sort of visual world that reminds you del Toro paints with light. Then the creature arrives. Jacob Elordi, towering and spectral, steps into the role with a raw vulnerability that is startling at first and then devastating. Del Toro refuses to portray the creature as the grunting caricature that popular culture calcified over decades. Instead he threads Shelley's original idea back into the performance. The creature is innocent. He is curious. He is self aware far earlier than anyone expects. When Elordi moves, he moves like someone discovering his own limbs for the first time. When he speaks, there is a hesitant lyricism in his voice that makes it impossible not to feel protective toward him. Underneath the makeup and the bluish pallor of reanimated flesh is a performance that shifts from newborn confusion to crushing despair in slow, painful increments.
The film's emotional engine rests on the dynamic between creator and creation. Victor cannot tolerate the creature's need for affection because it exposes his own hollow interior. He wants to play God but not father. He wants the glory of creating life without the responsibility of nurturing it. Isaac's portrayal leans into this contradiction until it becomes unbearable to watch. Yet the script never allows the creature to become a blank symbol of victimhood. He is hurt but not hopeless. He is angry but capable of great tenderness. One of the most affecting lines in the film comes when he says, with heartbreaking clarity, "I am obscene to you, but to myself I simply am." In a world that treats difference as monstrosity, the creature becomes the only being who understands the value of simply existing.
Del Toro threads Milton's "Paradise Lost" throughout the film, honouring Mary Shelley's original impulse. The creature reads it. He identifies with Adam abandoned by God. He also identifies with Lucifer, cast out for daring to seek knowledge. These parallels are not subtle, but they are never heavy handed. They give the film a moral undertow. One can feel del Toro in constant conversation with Shelley and Milton, reshaping old theological questions into cinematic grief. Perhaps the film's quietest revelation is its insistence that the line between man and monster is not drawn by appearance but by compassion. There are scenes of violence that made me flinch and scenes of beauty that made me pause and wonder. Del Toro has always walked that tightrope. Here it becomes thematic. Life can be brutal. Life can be tender. Sometimes the two mingle so closely they are indistinguishable. What sets this adaptation apart is its willingness to linger in that emotional contradiction. The story never forgets that its characters are all broken in their own ways. Victor is broken by pride. The creature is broken by loneliness. Elizabeth is broken by forces she cannot control. Even the world around them seems fractured, shuddering under the weight of inventions meant to preserve life but more often used to destroy it.
The ending, which I will not spoil, softens the novel's sharpest cruelty without betraying its spirit. It is not a comedy. It is not a tragedy either. It feels like del Toro offering both his characters and his audience a final gesture of grace. It is as if he is trying to answer the epigraph that Shelley borrowed from Milton. Did I ask to be made? The film responds gently. No. But you deserve to be seen anyway. This Frankenstein belongs to Guillermo del Toro in the way the original belongs to Mary Shelley. It carries their shared belief that monsters are rarely born. They are shaped by the hands that make them and by the hearts that fail them. This film is a work of great empathy. It is also a warning. In the end, we are always responsible for what we create, whether that creation is a child, a story, or a world that must learn how to be kinder than the one we inherited.