Delving into the Gothic World of Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ Adaptation

‘An idea, a feeling became clear to me. The hunter did not hate the wolf. The wolf did not hate the sheep. But violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of the world. It would hunt you and kill you just for being who you are.’

- Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro, 2025

I’ll be the first to admit that whenever I finish a movie and log it on Letterboxd (which is linked on my homepage, in case you’re interested in what goes on in my head), my reviews often feel partially cooked, still a little raw in the middle, and comprised of a bunch of jigsaw pieces that don’t actually complete a picture. This has never been more true than of my review for Guillermo del Toro’s latest feature film, brought to us by Netflix – which is still hard to believe, considering their disappointing track record lately. So many things were floating through my brain while watching the new ‘Frankenstein’, starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth, that my review was, frankly, all over the damn place.

I sometimes struggle with coherence, okay. Friends who’ve heard me try and recount a tale will know that wholeheartedly.

So I thought, let’s crack open a word document. It’s where some of my best work happens. Though Letterboxd is my recent social media obsession, I still sometimes feel that their canvas isn’t big enough for everything that I want to communicate, and I feel the pressure to summarise as much as I can, because who really wants to read an essay on Letterboxd?

My main takeaways from this movie were, in no particular order: del Toro has a deep and meaningful understanding of Shelley’s original text, Jacob Elordi was the best casting decision by far, and all of the film’s practical effects, costumes and makeup were gorgeous.

Despite the movie diverging quite a bit from the plot of the original text towards the latter half, and, without mentioning direct spoilers, chooses to portray the Creature in an extremely sympathetic light, this is still the most faithful adaptation of Shelley’s text we have and I believe we will ever have. There is something about the dichotomy between man and monster, nature and nurture, power and submission, that del Toro takes to be the real meat of this story, and he consistently blurs the lines between these stark concepts, twisting audience expectations. Even as someone very familiar with Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, or ‘The Modern Prometheus’ (I loved that Prometheus got a little shoutout in the film, by the way), I did not feel safe or secure in my belief that I knew what was coming. I was completely enthralled by del Toro’s version of the tale, from beginning to end. The structure of the film, being split into a Prelude, Frankenstein’s Tale, and the Creature’s Tale, worked really well as a cyclical structure, and was reminiscent of what it feels like to read the novel. I appreciated the somewhat daring choices that were made, such as the ship on the ice, and having Frankenstein’s experiment appear not to work at first, and then appear at the foot of his bed, that all contributed to the adaptation feeling as faithful as possible.

Would I argue that the film was slightly too gratuitous with just how much we sympathised with the Creature? One might say so, yes. I think the power of the original text is that despite all of his horrible crimes and actions you might take to be unforgivable, the reader understands that the Creature has not been nurtured in the way he deserved as a fresh, blank canvas of a being who was brought into the world and immediately rejected. Not once but over and over again, by his ‘father’ and by the DeLaceys, with whom he builds an intensely human and personal bond, and whose portrayal in the film I greatly appreciated. I think the DeLaceys in Shelley’s novel are crucial to the characterisation of the Creature, as they allow us to see his great propensity for love and kindness. Being accepted as part of a family having been ripped from him a second time, the Creature then enacts his revenge. His anger is contextualised and perhaps justified.

I think it should be a moral struggle to sympathise with the creature – it allows us as readers and critical thinkers to understand that multiple things can be true at the same time, a powerful idea I often see being disregarded currently. The Creature is both a being of pure innocence with the ability to love and feel pain, and a being who has used his great strength as a tool for violence and vengeance. But those things do not negate the fact that he has been treated poorly – it’s what builds complexity and complicated feelings of empathy in Shelley’s novel. I would argue that at times it is too easy to be on the Creature’s side in del Toro’s adaptation, which is only emphasised by Jacob Elordi’s beautiful and tender portrayal of the character. I will never get over how Elordi conveys such depth of pain and sorrow merely through his eyes.

This is not to say my sympathies ever lie with Victor, however, whose portrayal by Oscar Isaac is also a standout performance, ever the intoxicatingly passionate yet overly ambitious crazed scientist audiences have come to expect, flawed and damned by his own actions that seek to overturn the natural ways of life and will of God. Frankenstein makes a God of himself, and suffers the consequences of that kind of power. I always appreciate the rightful villainisation of Victor, especially now, when so many people in power think they can control nature or are above the will of the world.

I cannot discuss this adaptation without also mentioning the beautiful gothic style of its sets and costumes. Elizabeth Harlander’s costumes in particular, though Mia Goth was potentially underutilised as an actress in this film, stood out in every single scene, almost making her presence otherworldly in contrast to fellow characters. The deep reds and greens stood out beautifully for me, and there were so many other artistic details and decisions I loved, such as a reference to Michaelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’ through the hands of Victor and the Creature, looking mortality directly in the face through the skull from ‘Hamlet’, and the stone carving of Medusa’s head overlooking Victor’s lab as a nod to another misunderstood monster. If there’s one thing you can count on del Toro for, it’s his eye for detail.

There was no way I could forget to mention Mike Hill either, who worked on the Creature design for this film. From the trailer and promotional content for this film, I had very much expected Elordi to completely disappear into this role, and I know that a lot of critics have been bothered by the fact that his face is actually recognisable, however throughout the film I began to love that about the Creature. I think his face being recognisably human only accentuates the humanness that is already a part of him. I loved the colour, I loved how he really looked like he’d been cobbled together (though quite carefully and attentively, this was Victor’s life’s work after all), from lots of different bodies. Had he been completely unrecognisable as a human, or as Elordi, it would’ve made for a very different, cliché Halloween-esque Creature that we’ve seen countless times before.

This film solidified what ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ had already convinced me of: Guillermo del Toro is a wonderfully creative director with an eye for the darkly weird and ethereal that I am just as fascinated by, and I will definitely be seeking out more of his work in the future.