Guillermo del Toro loves his monsters so much that he’s incapable of letting them be truly monstrous, and this fatal affection has finally caught up with him. His Frankenstein is a gorgeous, painstakingly crafted betrayal of Mary Shelley‘s novel—a film that mistakes sympathy for depth and cruelty for complexity. I sat in the dark watching this thing unfold with a growing sense of melancholy, not because the movie moved me, but because I was witnessing a director with extraordinary visual gifts fundamentally misunderstand why Shelley’s creature has haunted us for two centuries.
The problem isn’t that del Toro has taken liberties with the source material. Every adaptation must. The problem is that his liberties flatten the moral landscape of the novel into the kind of simplistic good-versus-evil schema you’d expect from a lesser filmmaker. His Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac with all the subtlety of a silent-film villain, is a manipulative, abusive creep from the first frame. The movie paints him in such unambiguous strokes of wickedness that you wonder why anyone in the story tolerates his presence for five minutes. Shelley’s Victor was something far more interesting and far more disturbing: a man whose monstrousness arose not from malice but from a kind of cosmic self-absorption, a narcissism so complete that he simply couldn’t register the needs or suffering of others. When Shelley’s Victor creates his creature, he doesn’t chain him up and begin a program of systematic abuse. He flees in horror at what he’s done—and this cowardly abandonment, this refusal to take responsibility for his creation, is what sets the tragedy in motion.
That distinction matters enormously. Shelley understood that the worst things human beings do to each other often come not from calculated evil but from carelessness, from the failure to imagine that our actions have consequences for others. Victor’s sin isn’t that he’s a sadist; it’s that he’s so wrapped up in his own ambitions and fears that he never considers what might become of the life he’s brought into the world. His family worries sick about him while he toils in his laboratory, and he doesn’t think to send word. When the creature warns him that he will visit on Victor’s wedding night, Victor assumes the threat is directed at himself, not his bride—because who else could possibly matter? This is grayer territory, more uncomfortable terrain, than the cartoon wickedness del Toro substitutes. It implicates us in ways that watching a movie villain cannot.
And then there’s the creature himself, whom del Toro transforms into something like a very large, very unfortunate puppy. In Shelley’s novel, the creature begins innocent but becomes genuinely monstrous—not because he was born bad, but because a world that recoils from him in disgust gives him nothing to hold onto except his rage. The creature wants love, companionship, the simple recognition that he exists as a being worthy of consideration. Denied all of this, he makes a terrible choice: if he cannot be loved, he will at least be feared. If he cannot receive kindness, he will inflict pain. The horror of Shelley’s creature is that we understand him—we follow the logic of his transformation—and yet we cannot excuse what he becomes. He murders a child. He frames an innocent woman for the crime. He systematically destroys everyone Victor loves. His tragedy is real, but so is his culpability.
Del Toro can’t abide this. His creature remains, throughout the film, essentially a victim. The sequence with the blind man illustrates the difference perfectly. In Shelley’s novel, the creature has secretly been learning language and civilization by observing a family through a crack in their cottage wall. He finally reveals himself to the blind father, hoping that someone who cannot see his hideous form might accept him. When the rest of the family returns and drives him away in horror, when he comes back to find they’ve fled entirely, he burns the cottage to the ground in a fury of rejection and despair. It’s a terrible act, the moment when the creature crosses a line—and we feel the full weight of it precisely because we’ve understood his longing. In del Toro’s version, the blind man is killed by wolves, and when some villagers find the creature with the body, they attack him, assuming he’s the culprit. The creature doesn’t do anything wrong. He’s just misunderstood. You see the difference? Del Toro has systematically removed every instance of the creature’s moral agency, every moment when he chooses darkness over light, until what remains is a pitiable brute who does nothing to deserve his fate.
The film lost me entirely somewhere around the death of Elizabeth, which del Toro stages with the kind of lurid excess that has become his signature but which here feels simply wrongheaded. The movie has established—inexplicably—that Elizabeth harbors some kind of attraction to the creature, and this wrecks the entire architecture of Shelley’s story. In the novel, Elizabeth is Victor’s beloved, and the creature kills her precisely to condemn Victor to the same loveless existence that Victor condemned him to. The creature’s revenge has a terrible symmetry: you made me, you abandoned me, you denied me a companion, and now you will know what it is to live without the possibility of love. When del Toro introduces a romantic triangle, he reduces this cosmic tragedy to something tawdry. The creature isn’t suffering the unbearable knowledge that no one in the world can ever love someone like him. He’s just upset that his dad was mean to him and shot the girl he liked. It’s the difference between Aeschylus and a soap opera.
I’ve seen del Toro do better than this. Pan’s Labyrinth worked its good-versus-evil dynamics within a fairy-tale framework where such moral clarity felt appropriate, and even there he gave us the Faun, a genuinely ambiguous figure who kept us uncertain about his nature and intentions. But something has happened to del Toro in recent years. The Shape of Water had the same problem—all that gorgeous production design in service of a story that never trusted its audience to navigate moral complexity. He’s become a filmmaker who points enormous neon arrows at the baddies and the goodies, and it’s making his work feel increasingly thin.
The visual craft on display in Frankenstein is, admittedly, considerable. The prototype monsters are wonderfully grotesque, the sets have that hand-built quality that distinguishes del Toro’s work from the anonymous digital environments of most contemporary blockbusters, and the costumes are lavish. But it’s all dollhouse furniture—exquisite miniatures arranged in rooms where no real people live. The digital photography, with its plastic, over-graded look, doesn’t help matters. There’s a flatness to the images that fights against the Gothic atmosphere the film is straining to create. Some viewers have praised the film’s beauty, but I found it oddly artificial, like watching a very expensive catalog come to life.
What bothers me most, finally, is the Byron quote that closes the film. Del Toro seems not to have considered that Frankenstein was written by a young woman—Mary Shelley, the daughter of the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft—and that this matters. The most influential science fiction novel ever written, a book that has shaped our understanding of creation and responsibility and what we owe to the beings we bring into the world, came from an eighteen-year-old girl who had recently lost a child. There’s something unseemly about a film that erases this feminine authorship, that treats Byron as the presiding spirit of a story that was actually written by the woman he and Percy Shelley overshadowed in life. It feels appropriate that a movie this devoted to stripping complexity from its source material would end by minimizing the woman who created it.
Del Toro is, by all accounts, one of the most decent and passionate people working in movies, and I take no pleasure in saying that his Frankenstein represents a serious failure of understanding. He has made a film that looks like a faithful adaptation while systematically betraying everything that made Shelley’s novel matter. The monster who cannot be monstrous, the creator who is nothing but monstrous, the love interest who muddles the tragedy, the visual beauty that remains somehow sterile—it all adds up to the most disappointing film I’ve seen in years. We deserve better monsters than this. We deserve monsters who scare us precisely because we recognize ourselves in their terrible choices. Del Toro has given us a creature we can only pity, and pity is the death of tragedy.
