Movie night chez Robert Thomson this evening was Guillermo del Toro’s almost painfully beautiful Frankenstein.
I should start out by stating flatly that while I read the novel as a teenager, the film oeuvre has never been my chosen wheelhouse. In cinema, the story has always been a cold one, no matter how lush the cinematography in the later films, or how lurid the gothic horror, or how saturated the colours, à la Hammer horror.
The characters were stock, the nuances went unexplored, and there were precious few scenes that couldn’t be rounded up with a piercing shriek or two.
What struck me most, about del Toro’s version—and this did not occur to me until tonight— was that I had been fed a sleekly patriarchal view of Victor Frankenstein my whole life.
In films, he is portrayed as a monomaniacal alpha male “tortured genius,” and even his flaws are wrapped in a spoor of the sort of manly grandeur and hubris that no woman would ever be allowed.
The audience might find Victor’s ambition dreadful in some ways, but the invitation to admire it is obliquely proffered, and that invitation has been accepted by audiences since 1931 when the James Whale version for Universal Pictures made its début.
Del Toro, on the other hand, isn’t afraid to show the complexity of the abused, spoiled, masculine adult child, riddled with jealousy and resentment, as well as ambition and genius, playing with matches.
Where the creation of life might conceivably inspire a protective maternal reaction in a female creator, in the case of del Toro’s Victor Frankenstein it primarily inspires possessive wonder, curiosity, disdain, and a delight in his own brilliance, all of it marbled with an appropriate undercurrent of horror.
Indeed, if that had been the reaction of a female creator, the audience might have branded her “the true monster” long before such a judgement was heaped upon Victor.
The interactions between the creature and Elizabeth (played by Mia Goth)—in the del Toro version, Victor’s brother’s fiancée—allow for a feminine perspective that has been conspicuously absent from other filmed versions of this story, and she serves as a prism through which the humanity and vulnerability of the creature is even more brightly lit.
For Goth’s Elizabeth, there is none of the screaming, fainting, and clichéd “delicate white lady” pity of yore. In its place is a warm, intelligent empathy and kindness that fuels one of the two primary heart-centres of the story—Elizabeth’s and the creature’— that made me feel as though Mary Shelley’s moral spirit was finally allowed to be present in a film of her novel, and have a say.
Del Toro did not flinch from showing the cruelty and cowardice it would take to create a being, then try to destroy it because its existence had become inconvenient. With his creation, replicates a twisted, godlike version of the abusive inhumanity he suffered at the hands of his own father. In fact Victor’s cruelty and petulance are front and centre throughout del Toro’s Frankenstein, shown to be two of the relentless forces that shape the entire doomed arc of his life, rendering his ultimate redemption nearly impossible.
Wherever del Toro deviated from the novel, it was to advance the novel’s spirit with an authenticity that burned. In the book, Shelley pointedly addressed the hubris of “playing God,” but film portrayals have focused on a tinny, superficial version of that concept, primarily in the My goodness, imagine what it would take to be that bold! vein.
The location of the soul, and the debt owed to any being endowed with one, is utterly bypassed, or, at best, skimmed over. As an insightful and articulate atheist friend pointed out last night, nothing is more like “God” than creating life, then abandoning it to a word of pain, loneliness, and silence.
In a completely agnostic way, del Toro unambiguously flirts with the notion that the creature has been endowed with a soul, in spite of the artificiality of its creation. It’s hard to overstate how shattering that moment in the film was for Robert and me.
Oscar Isaacs delivered a stellar, very complex iteration of Victor Frankenstein—no small feat in a character that has been done, and overdone, for decades.
That said the real heart of the film was Jacob Elordi’s astonishing performance as the creature, which captured me from his very first moment onscreen, and which moved me (literally) to tears at various points.
He allows us to see the creature as beautiful and fully sensitive, which in turn supercharges our own empathy and compassion for him, thereby transporting the tale itself into deep realms it has not previously charted.
Whereas previous films iterations of the character have allowed us to feel pity as well as horror—think Karloff, Lee, or even De Niro—Elordi’s version goes far, far beyond anything as mundane as pity, far beyond empathy, into actual identification—if only for the universally accessible knowledge of the agony of abandonment.
I’ve enjoyed Elordi’s work in everything, but this performance was next level star-making in its humanity. You’re really going to have to watch the film to see what I mean, because waxing in too much detail risks spoilers, and this masterpiece deserves better than reviews spoilers.
Criticisms of the film as being “too long” are mildly interesting, but one of the advantages of having been born some years back is that my attention span wasn’t shaped by MTV and music videos, and Frankenstein isn’t really a film for fidgety or stupid people anyway.
This film broke my heart, and it stayed broken for hours afterwards. I think Mary Shelley herself would have loved del Toro’s Frankenstein, even as she would likely have marvelled at how the essence of her novel—and the questions at the core of it—took 207 years for a filmmaker to finally get just right.
© 2025 by Michael Rowe
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