There’s a moment in Guillermo del Toro’s "Frankenstein" where the thunder quiets, the lightning fades, and what remains isn’t a monster or a man, but something suspended between the two — a being stitched together by grief, rejection, and the unspoken ache of wanting to be loved. Watching it, I felt that ache return in me. Because beneath the Gothic splendour, beneath the howling winds and the feverish machinery, this story has always been about fathers and sons — about the things they pass down, and the things they fail to. I grew up without mine, and I am now one myself, so it’s impossible not to feel the shadow of my fathers absence, just as it is impossible not to feel the heart of my sons journey (so far), echoing through Victor Frankenstein and his creation. Here, del Toro has not adapted Mary Shelley’s novel so much as stripped it bare, exposing the tender, infected nerve at its heart.
"Frankenstein" aches with the kind of sorrow that can only come from understanding the human instinct to destroy what we can’t comprehend. It’s about the loneliness that festers between creation and creator, the quiet horror of being born from someone’s ego rather than their love. Every choice in the film feels guided by that truth: that existence without affection becomes a kind of purgatory. The film treats monstrosity not as deformity, but as inheritance; the creature isn’t terrifying because he’s grotesque, but because he mirrors the cruelty that made him. It’s a story about emotional genetics — how bitterness, pride, and neglect can pass through bloodlines just as surely as bone or flesh, and Del Toro threads this melancholy through every frame, turning Shelley’s parable into something deeply modern: a study of what happens when men mistake control for care, and when the desperate search for recognition becomes more powerful than the need to be kind.
Oscar Isaac’s Victor isn’t some wide-eyed visionary; he’s a man drowning in legacy, built in the image of a father who withheld love like it was oxygen. You can see the hatred festering beneath his intellect — that desperate need to prove himself not through compassion but conquest. In del Toro’s version, Victor never marries Elizabeth, never knows the gentleness of another’s touch. His life becomes a collection of unfeeling experiments, every heartbeat measured, every feeling dissected. He constructs his creation not to play God, but to rewrite the past — to show his father, now dead, that he was capable of creating life from what was once worthless. The tragedy, of course, is that he repeats exactly what was done to him. He builds a son only to abandon him.
And that son — Jacob Elordi’s creature — is nothing short of a revelation. The first time we see him truly alive, there’s a trembling uncertainty in his eyes, like a child born into a world already against him. For long stretches he says nothing, and doesn’t need to. Elordi’s performance is an opera of silence, told through posture, breath, and the kind of sadness that sits deep in the body. When he learns to observe life — the warmth of a home, the music of laughter, the unbearable intimacy of kindness — it’s not science that teaches him, but empathy. And that’s part of del Toro’s quiet genius here: the creature becomes more human the less he tries to be.
Visually, the film is staggering — a cathedral of decay. Every frame looks hand-carved from guilt and memory. The production design by Tamara Deverell and Dan Laustsen’s cinematography create a world where every shadow feels inhabited by conscience. There’s grandeur, yes — flickering candelabras, clockwork laboratories, sepulchral halls that stretch into infinity — but what makes it breathtaking isn’t its size, it’s its sincerity. Del Toro directs like a man possessed by empathy; he builds his sets as if he’s trying to resurrect something holy that’s been forgotten. The detail borders on obsessive, and in truth, it’s the only time the film threatens to lose its rhythm — when spectacle, scale and scope, briefly overtake soul.
And courtesy of my love for GDT, let's not even start on those awful digitally rendered CGI sequences which certainly don't do this 120 million dollar film any justice, because for a filmmaker so attuned to texture and tactility, those moments certainly sting, where they should have been cut.
Still, even at its most indulgent, this world breathes. And at its centre stands Isaac, giving one of his most unhinged performances to date — all ego and anguish, driven by a father’s disdain and his own festering insecurity. It’s fitting that Isaac once played Nathan in Ex Machina, another creator who sought divinity and found decay. But here, del Toro pushes him further — no longer sleek or detached, but raw and bloodied by his own ambition.
I was less taken by Mia Goth’s limited presence as Elizabeth — she is both muse and absence, and while the choice suits del Toro’s vision of a story told almost entirely through the male lens of creation and rejection, it left me wanting her compassion to linger longer in the narrative. But perhaps that’s the point. In this world, empathy is scarce. Love exists only as memory, as potential, as something glimpsed and lost.
By the end, when the creature finally meets his creator again, del Toro diverges from Shelley’s bleak conclusion and does something quietly extraordinary. He allows for mercy. For the first time, Victor looks upon his creation not as failure, nor as proof, but as son — and the creature, scarred and burdened by hate, is given the chance to choose something different. Not revenge, but release. It’s a moment so simple, yet it undid me completely.
That’s what this film captures better than any version before it: the notion that we are not condemned to repeat what made us. We inherit our fathers’ flaws, yes — their temper, their silence, their cruelty — but somewhere inside that inheritance lives the possibility of change. Del Toro’s Frankenstein finds that possibility and refuses to let go of it.
It’s rare to find a film this large that still feels so human, so bruised, so in tune with the pain of its characters. This isn’t the work of a director playing with genre — it’s a confession, a reckoning, an open wound stitched together by grace and horror. And as the final storm fades, what lingers isn’t fear or pity, but something deeper: the realisation that even monsters, if shown love, might learn to live.
9/10
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