Del Toro's Frankenstein Is The Most Faithful Shelly Adaptation

Director: Guillermo del Toro 2025

Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz

5 stars

For fans of psychological horror who love the deep dive, Del Toro always gives us the ocean in his adaptation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Every scene is awash with symbolism and meaning, delivering the grand baroque entertainment that genre movies do best. He matches his protagonist’s monstrous drive, pushing every film department to its limits, tempered with the soul of a poet. Del Toro’s adaptation is the most faithful to Shelly’s novel. He captures the lens Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein through. As an 18-year-old girl on the cusp of the age of enlightenment, he restores her rightful place as a historical genius who was frightened by the right things.  

In the dawning of the 18th Century, Shelly observed the profound shift happening in science and mathematics. Debates raged between vitalism and materialism: is there a special life force or is it all just chemistry that can be manipulated? Chemistry was moving from kitchen alchemy to exploring its role in the nature of life itself. Her biggest influence was Galvanism, the idea that electricity played a major role in sentience, spawning grim ideas about reality.  

Mathematician Ian Stewart said, “By the 18th century science had been so successful in laying bare the laws of nature that many thought there was nothing left to discover. Immutable laws prescribed the motion of every particle in the universe, exactly and forever: the task of the scientist was to elucidate the implications of those laws for any particular phenomenon of interest.” 18th Century philosophers, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, warned of the dangers of perusing science for vanity rather than actual improvement of people’s lives. His quote, “Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.” This is the spiritual theme of Frankenstein.  

A great scene demonstrates this as Henrich (Christoph Waltz), Viktor’s arms-dealer benefactor, stages a photo shoot of a rubenesque nude woman holding suggestive peaches. As the two men discuss the transcendence of a woman’s body to create life, the curvaceous Venus wanders off naked eating a peach, her use as an object to capture Henrich’s controlled tableau of femininity itself making her immediately obsolete and useless. Again, Del Toro’s generous heart gives us 10-layers deep in a single scene.  

Viktor (Oscar Issac) meeting Henrich is the film’s turning point. In gaining the power to mass produce high-powered weaponry, ambitious men discovered the most dangerous drug of all, the ability to harness death to reshape the world as they saw fit. Henrich naturally wants to use that fortune to go full circle, to create life itself.  The two men discuss the possibility of reanimating corpses with the kind of banal obsessiveness women have come to dread. We find out in the end, as in all these desires, Henrich is driven by the same madness as Viktor. He wants to live inside Victor’s creation. More than a fear of death, it’s a fear of being born irrelevant, just another thing spit out by nature itself, as meaningless as the peaches he photographs.  

As the turning point of the fillm, the main female character Lady Elizabeth (Mia Goth), the fiancé of William (Felix Kammerer), Viktor’s light-hearted brother enters at the same time as Henrich. Her giant lavish gowns are made from patterns found only in nature overshadow Viktor. Lady Elizabeth enters not only as the only main female character in the movie but as the only one who has a profound reverence for nature through the lens of science.  She’s the remedy to Viktor’s madness that he's unable to see but is profoundly bewitched by. 

Horror is the perfect genre to explore this fight between Enlightenment and its reaction against it, Romanticism. Viktor’s mother and Lady Elizabeth represent this battle. From the delirious beauty of her nature-inspired gowns to her emotional, sublime relationship with the monster (Jacob Elordi), Del Toro leaves no mystery as to where Shelly herself stood on the subject. By immersing his adaptation so fully in the 18th Century, Del Toro is able to convey the depth of Mary’s ability to create a horror story that reflected the moment she was living thru historically. By highlighting this conflict within Viktor himself, Del Toro hints at the potential happy ending that sets this adaptation apart from all others.  

Through history Frankenstein became the story to point to whenever men doggedly performed the task of trying to outwit nature itself, with nature always winning by the creations always being abominations.  It’s Viktor’s relationship to his creature that comes to mind when discussing the atom bomb of the century to follow. Del Toros’ Frankenstein allows the space for why Shelly’s book may indeed be one of the most relevant horror novels ever written. It was a prophecy. Like Viktor working in his laboratory, Shelly witnessed the birth of what was to come. A century later, Oppenheimer's musings on the atom bomb live in the same wheelhouse as the fictional Frankenstein. From the cold maniacal arrogance that brought the bomb into being to the assurance that harnessing God-like power was the only option demonstrates why Shelly’s novel still captures our attention. Del Toro’s adaptation focuses on Shelly’s deft understanding that the Age of Enlightenment delivered the violent frightening fervor to strip Mother Nature of all her mysteries, with horrifying results.  

 While many of these discoveries radically improved the quality of people’s lives, the violent sting of man’s eagerness to erase the mysterious soulfulness within nature and within the feminine is unapologetically brought to the forefront in Del Toro’s adaptation. 

And because Del Toro respects the power of cinema gives the happy ending that heals the psychic wounds that lead some men to try to drain the world of all mystery. He puts the Creature and Viktor in conversation with one another, relaying both sides of the story to a sea captain who is on his own doomed mission.  

While Viktor discovers the horrors of his deeply flawed logic, the creature is thrust into the healing journey of the abused child, abandoned for reflecting the father’s twisted soul. When the Creature is shown the sublime perfection of living in the natural cycles of life, he experiences the rage that all abandoned who are given empathy and care have to reckon with, understanding their own permanent loss of the love they deserve. Rather than continuing the cycle of endless destruction, the two find release in empathy and forgiveness.  

But, in the end Del Toro’s Frankenstein painstakingly offers the chilling reminder that humans are the only species who willingly and enthusiastically create our own annihilation. Frankenstein endures because we wake up every single day with Viktor’s creature standing over our beds, his creators ever regretful but never learning.  

References: Today in Science History-18th Centaury Quotes, Wikipedia-Age of Enlightenment,