For Guillermo del Toro, the story of Frankenstein has never been primarily about a monster; it has always been about a savior. Its central anxieties about creation and responsibility have been endlessly reinterpreted over two centuries, finding expression as gothic literature, cinematic horror, broad comedy, and stage melodrama. Each new version has, in a sense, scavenged from the body of its predecessors. Now, the Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, a director long celebrated for his sympathy toward the monstrous, has offered his own interpretation.

The result is not merely another adaptation but an ambitious, operatic synthesis. del Toro’s film treats the myth’s sprawling history—from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s page to Boris Karloff’s lumbering pathos and the stark ink of Bernie Wrightson—as a single, coherent text, crafting from it a grand and moving new creation.

The film represents the culmination of a lifelong obsession for del Toro, who has said he has been “in training for 30 years to do it.” His preoccupation with the material began at age 7, after seeing James Whale’s 1931 classic; he has described feeling an “immediate and absolute soul transference” with Boris Karloff’s monster.

For del Toro, who grew up in a devoutly Catholic family, a “Creature” was not a figure of terror but one of salvation, a symbol of “forgiveness for being imperfect.” When the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, it was met with a 13-minute standing ovation, signaling its arrival not merely as another title for Netflix, but as a significant, and defiant, cinematic event.

The film’s very existence feels like an act of defiance. It is a gothic melodrama of formidable scale — running 149 minutes with a reported $120 million budget — built with towering physical sets and painstaking practical effects. That it was financed by a streaming service, yet clearly conceived for the grand canvas of the cinema, only emphasizes its anomalous nature.

Wielding the considerable clout earned from a career spent celebrating the monstrous, del Toro has imposed a classical, deeply personal, auteurist model onto a modern distribution platform. His goal, he has said, was to reclaim a “scale of ideas” and “scale of ambition,” delivering not disposable “eye candy,” but enduring “eye protein.” The story of a man who wills a new being into existence thus becomes an affirmation of the act of cinematic creation itself.

The Del Toro Doctrine: A Cathedral of Flawed Beauty

In the films of Guillermo del Toro, texture amounts to a kind of theology. His aesthetic, a baroque fusion of fairy-tale tenderness and gothic horror, is the physical manifestation of his core philosophy: that “Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.” This doctrine finds its grandest expression in ‘Frankenstein,’ where the film’s overwhelming visual language—its intricate surfaces, mournful colors and architecture—is not decoration, but the very substance of the argument.

With the help of regular collaborators, including the production designer Tamara Deverell and the cinematographer Dan Laustsen, del Toro has constructed a tangible nineteenth-century Europe, one that feels both historically grounded and mythically heightened. It is a world of crumbling castles, ornate interiors and gaslit dread, its visuals resembling what one critic called “hi-tech stained glass or illustrated plates in a Victorian tome.”

The centerpiece of this world is Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory, which has been reimagined not as a cellar but as a towering, cathedral-like structure, often flooded with light — a choice that denies its creator the comfort of shadows in which to hide his guilt.

Populating this tangible world are creations of flesh and craft, not of pixels. del Toro’s staunch advocacy for practical effects is a guiding principle here, a philosophy that was bluntly summarized by the actor Christoph Waltz, who quipped, “CGI is for losers.” The director, however, was quick to clarify the point with a more measured take: “As a filmmaker, there is no bad resource. There is only badly used resources.”

The film’s most profound physical statement is the “Creature” itself, a masterpiece of prosthetic makeup from the supervisor Mike Hill. An application process that took the actor Jacob Elordi up to 10 hours to endure has resulted in a being whose skin is a veritable patchwork map of suffering. It is a commitment to the physical that grounds the fantastical horror in a visceral reality. For del Toro, this devotion to the tangible is itself a spiritual act.

The film’s aesthetic, however, is more than simply gothic; it is steeped in a specific, almost religious reverence. On the first day of shooting, the director is said to have held up a drawing of the “Creature” he had made as a teenager, telling his cast, “This is like Jesus to me.” That sensibility informs the film’s visual and thematic vocabulary.

Victor’s laboratory is recast as a kind of perverted altar, and his act of creation becomes a blasphemous ritual. In this framework, the “Creature” — cursed with a life he never requested — is transformed into a tormented, Christ-like figure of suffering. He is a martyr, born of a flawed and arrogant god in Victor and condemned by a world that recoils from his very existence. The narrative, then, is elevated from a simple cautionary tale about scientific hubris into something closer to a passion play: a search for grace in a profoundly fractured world.

A Byronic God, a Soulful Creation

At the heart of this grandly operatic film are two commanding performances that transform the central narrative. What might have been a horror story becomes, instead, a devastating father-son tragedy, a psychological struggle between the creator’s hubris and the anguish of his creation.

Oscar Isaac plays Dr. Victor Frankenstein not as a simple mad scientist but as a Byronic antihero of boundless ego. His motivation is rooted in the death of his beloved mother and a seething rebellion against his cruel, oppressive father (Charles Dance). Victor’s obsession with conquering death is less a scientific pursuit than a Promethesan rage against the patriarchal order.

Isaac channels a bohemian, rock-star energy, modeling his Victor on figures like David Bowie. With his pompadour and velvet coat, he turns his laboratory into a “stadium stage” for his own genius, a peacock performing for an audience of none. It is a performance of ferocious intelligence and chilling callousness.

Isaac channels a bohemian, rock-star energy, modeling his Victor on figures like David Bowie. With his pompadour and velvet coat, he turns his laboratory into a “stadium stage” for his own genius, a peacock performing for an audience of none. It is a performance of ferocious intelligence and chilling callousness.

As the “Creature,” Jacob Elordi, a last-minute replacement for Andrew Garfield, delivers what is being hailed as a career-defining performance that becomes the soul of the film. del Toro’s conception of the character defies a century of cinematic iconography. Portrayed by Elordi as an ethereal, tragic figure, the “Creature” is assembled from body parts plucked from a battlefield.

His command of physicality is remarkable, wordlessly charting an entire psychological odyssey from the open-chested curiosity of a newborn to the hunched crouch of a rejected adult. Beneath layers of prosthetics, it is his eyes—vast, soulful and brimming with sorrowful intelligence—that anchor the performance.

A crucial decision in this adaptation is the restoration of the “Creature”’s voice. Drawing directly from Shelley’s novel, del Toro presents an articulate being who learns to speak, his accent echoing that of a kind peasant who offers him instruction. The existential pain of his experience is crystallized in a line of the director’s own invention when the “Creature” finally confronts his maker: “I am obscene to you but to myself I simply am.”

This dynamic shifts the film firmly into the realm of Freudian psychodrama. The “Creature” becomes the physical embodiment of Victor’s own repressed trauma and self-loathing. Though Victor’s rebellion against his father fuels his ambition to be a better creator, his horrified recoil from his “son” is ultimately an act of profound self-rejection. The central conflict, then, is not Man versus Monster, but Man versus Himself.

In the flawed face of his creation, Victor sees the twin specters of his father’s cruelty and his mother’s mortality—a legacy of trauma from which he cannot escape.

An Epic Stitched from Familiar Parts

Guillermo del Toro approaches the Frankenstein legacy less as a burden than as a boneyard, a source of raw material for his own definitive creation. His narrative is a deliberate synthesis, stitching together elements from Shelley’s novel, classic cinema and gothic illustration.

The film’s composite nature is reflected even in its epic runtime; while some critics have found it “overstuffed,” the length appears to be a conscious choice, essential to achieving the film’s operatic scope.

While the film is anchored by Shelley’s original frame narrative, its most significant structural choice is the preservation of the novel’s radical shift in perspective to the “Creature,” a move that restores his intellect and agency. Yet the adaptation is far from slavish. del Toro weaves in cinematic homages, notably to James Whale’s 1931 film through the lightning-animated laboratory and the appearance of the blind hermit. The visual design further acknowledges its lineage, with clear traces of the influential 1983 illustrations by Bernie Wrightson, an artist the director has cited as a key inspiration.

Such an ambitious synthesis requires space, and at nearly two and a half hours, the film unfolds at a stately pace that has proved divisive. Some viewers have found the methodical approach “laborious.” Its tone shifts from high melodrama to philosophical inquiry and even moments of playful comedy, as in a scene where Victor mischievously overhears the confession of his brother’s fiancée, Elizabeth (a feisty Mia Goth), for whom he harbors his own affections. Yet the film’s very structure might be read as a meta-commentary on the act of adaptation.

In assembling his narrative from the constituent parts of the novel and its cinematic afterlife, del Toro is, in effect, performing the same act as his protagonist. The result is a film that rejects the sleek efficiency of a modern blockbuster, opting instead for something more challenging, complex and, in its flawed construction, more poignantly human.

Conclusion

The question that has animated Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s story for two centuries—who is the real monster?—is answered by Guillermo del Toro with what may be the most compassionate conclusion yet: that the distinction is meaningless, or that both creator and creation share the title. del Toro has filtered this foundational myth through his deeply personal and visually extravagant lens, moving beyond the confines of horror to create a moving melodrama about the terrible burden of creation and the tragedy of fathers and sons.

While a story about a man-made intelligence run amok might seem to offer a timely metaphor for the age of artificial intelligence, del Toro resists such a narrow interpretation. His film, he has suggested, is less about artificial intelligence than what he calls “natural stupidity” — the timeless human capacity for arrogance, cruelty and prejudice. It is a film that poses a fundamental question — What is it to be human? — and finds the answer not in perfection, but in the struggle for empathy and connection.

In the final analysis, this is more than just a monster movie; it is arguably the definitive Guillermo del Toro film, the vessel into which he has poured three decades of artistic obsession. The film is at once bombastic, sublime and even playful, and despite some critical reservations, the consensus has rightly recognized it as a “remarkable achievement,” an “epic-scale story of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry.”

The director has managed to find a heartbreaking soul in his magnificent, stitched-together machine, resulting in a work of such passion, craft and profound humanity that it feels, in a word, alive.