Opinion Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’: Shelley’s vision, remade for an age of innovation for blind profit
While Shelley’s Frankenstein was a sheltered scientist undone by his own hubris, del Toro’s is a broken son, an egotistical scientist, and undoubtedly the story’s villain
The film retains almost verbatim one of the novel’s most crucial declarations: Victor’s vow to “pursue nature to her hiding places”. 
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Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a ravishing retelling of Mary Shelley’s beloved classic, one that takes many bold detours from the original and yet remains its spiritual heir. Forced to abandon the epistolary frame of the novel, del Toro retains its architecture of conflicting testimonies by letting Victor Frankenstein and his Creature narrate their own stories in turn.
The director significantly ages the mad scientist from Shelley’s young university student to Oscar Issac’s seasoned middle-aged doctor parading his experiments before the learned elite. To this older, brasher Victor, del Toro adds a tragic backstory: A distant, abusive father and a beloved mother who dies in childbirth. Victor sets out to create life, yet once his creation draws breath and falters in saying anything beyond his name, he reenacts the very lovelessness that shaped him — acting like the father he despised instead of the nurturing mother whose absence haunts his world. In del Toro’s hands, Frankenstein is not merely the tale of a scientist who plays God, but of a son who becomes his father.
The film retains almost verbatim one of the novel’s most crucial declarations: Victor’s vow to “pursue nature to her hiding places”. Both versions of the scientist share the same chilling utilitarian logic. Each fashions his creature to be eight feet tall, not out of aesthetic design or moral deliberation but out of convenience and scale, never pausing to consider the consequences of such efficiency. Yet where Shelley’s Victor is a young scientist toiling alone, Del Toro’s is a man with a patron, funding, a giant laboratory, and a team.
The film’s subplot about Henrich Harlander’s sponsorship shifts the story’s moral axis from just Promethean overreach to the entanglement of knowledge and profit. While Shelley’s Victor scavenges charnel houses for fragments of the dead, del Toro’s Victor examines living prisoners awaiting execution and soldiers freshly slain in battle, making explicit the grotesque industrialisation of death. Del Toro reanimates the novel’s latent critique of utilitarian knowledge for a 21st-century audience.
Del Toro’s Elizabeth, too, undergoes a striking transformation — from Shelley’s gentle, passive, domestic ideal of womanhood to an opinionated young woman who critiques the war, is passionate about insects, and finds herself drawn to the Creature. In her communion with the smallest things and her affinity for the Creature, del Toro reclaims the ecological principle that appreciates nature and seeks to be part of it, rather than conquer it. She stands as the film’s moral counterpoint, the spirit of care and connectedness banished by Victor’s sterile ambition. In her, del Toro makes visible the novel’s suppressed presence, reminding us that the horror of creation in this story lies not just in defying God but in erasing the maternal.
Yet, in humanising the Creature so unambiguously and sanctifying Elizabeth, the film tips the novel’s delicate balance. Shelley’s text is built on the dissonance of identification — the reader’s sympathy oscillating between creature and creator. Del Toro’s version resolves that tension too easily: His Victor never reaches the remorse of Shelley’s, nor does the Creature commit the atrocities his textual counterpart did.
The film’s moral compass is made explicit when Victor’s brother, with his dying breath, tells him that he is the real monster. So while Shelley’s Frankenstein was a sheltered scientist undone by his own hubris, del Toro’s is a broken son, an egotistical scientist, and undoubtedly the story’s villain. The moral clarity that makes del Toro’s version cathartic also erases the novel’s ethical ambiguity.
Still, del Toro’s Frankenstein accomplishes something extraordinary: It restores Frankenstein to the realm of myth and brings it back into conversation. His visual imagination — opulent, grotesque, tender — puts Shelley’s Enlightenment anxieties in conversation with his Mexican heritage, Catholic iconography, and Greek mythology. He has often said that monsters are “the patron saints of our blissful imperfection.” His Frankenstein fulfills that credo: His Creature, beautifully portrayed by Jacob Elordi, is a being of aching beauty that will tug at all heartstrings.
Issac’s Victor, meanwhile, will remind all viewers of what happens when intellect divorces itself from ethical consideration. Del Toro’s vision creates a retelling and a resurrection: Mary Shelley’s dream of modernity is raised once more from the grave, for a world that still builds without considering what comes after creation.
The writer is assistant professor, Hindu College, University of Delhi
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