Guillermo del Toro’s recent adaptation of Frankenstein enters a long lineage of reinterpretations that seek not exclusively to present Mary Shelley’s text, but to claim authorship over its meaning. All others have proved disappointing by popular decree and I found that Del Toro’s was no different.
I greatly appreciated how Del Toro leaned into body horror more than any other element of the story. Shelley was pointedly uninterested in describing the grotesque; that moment of animation was withheld, not as a shortcoming but intentionally, so that Victor’s refusal to acknowledge the life he had made was horrifying enough. Del Toro, by contrast, has long been fascinated by the monstrous and grotesque, and his Creature reflects this ongoing aesthetic preoccupation. Body horror has firmly established its own subgenre in contemporary cinema, and specifically to Del Toro, becomes a medium through which he interrogates vulnerability and the porous boundary between beauty and revulsion. Arguably the clearest precedent, his debut film Cronos (1993), quickly established his technique as a manifesto for his body-horror sensibility. His depiction of the grotesque body is quite effective in Frankenstein, especially in the construction of the Creation, which succeeds on a purely sensory level, simultaneously evoking fascination and revulsion in viewers. In emphasising the corporeal, he reconfigures a novel of reflective horror into something we can behold.
But the pleasures of spectacle cannot disguise its flaws. I walked into the Lighthouse theatre expecting alterations (no source escapes its adaptation unchanged) but what struck me most was the degree to which the film misread the ethical and structural intelligence underwriting Shelley’s novel. Del Toro’s version orients itself around Gothic Romantics and an affectively sympathetic Creation; Shelley’s novel does none of this. Instead, Frankenstein functions as a text about the terrifying consequence of unmediated intellectual ambition. To sentimentalise the Creation is to flatten the novel’s epistemology. The film’s auditory design emphasises this. Moments like the Creation’s first attempt at forming words or the quiet whimpers that accompany his movements make him feel vulnerable rather than threatening and foster sympathy from the audience. Shelley kept the Creation at a conceptual distance through the framing of the narrative, therefore, there was little to feel empathetic about.
Shelley’s Creation is one of the most intellectually complex figures in early nineteenth-century literature and is a critique of Enlightenment rationality. He reads Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, texts traditionally associated with moral education. Yet, rather than civilising him, the very books that should affirm his humanity, only alienate him further. The irony is not lost on us readers. Shelley understands that lack of community is punishment. Del Toro rewrites this entirely when, in the film, literacy softens the Creation. A comforting idea, but it runs counter to Shelley’s intentions. The Creation is not tragic because he suffers, he is tragic because he is intelligent enough to understand his suffering.
The narrative rushes from one spectacle to the next with little breathing room as it favors set-piece sequences (the Creation’s birth, albeit cinematically good, was half the film) at the expense of the novel’s patient narrative structure. Scenes that in the book would function as moral reckoning instead become transitional, for instance, the removal of Henry Clerval. In the novel, Clerval functions as a moral and ethical counterpoint to Victor’s negligence. By omitting him, the adaptation erases a crucial measure of Victor’s moral failure. The deaths of William and Elizabeth (neither by the hand of the Creation) are similarly mishandled, and both occur rather abruptly, disrupting the film’s pacing. The result of these missteps is a momentum that carries the viewer forward into the story but leaves its ethical stakes underdeveloped. We might feel the shocks, but we do not live long enough in their consequences to judge Victor’s culpability properly. In fact, there is never a moment in the film in which viewers are prompted to question the ambiguity of who bears moral fault. Del Toro’s Victor is surprisingly more abhorrent than Shelley’s.
Presumably the most significant alteration, however, was the added romantic subplot between the Creation and Elizabeth. Suddenly, the Creation becomes a kind of tragic lover, mourning Elizabeth, instead of acting as Shelley’s Creation should: enacting vengeance against Victor. In an attempt to recover, Del Toro portrays a sequence that visually recalls Shelley’s sublime and the relentless pursuit central to the text. The Creation confronts Victor, his path of destruction laying bare the moral failure rooted in his refusal to assume responsibility. However, in the film, Victor is granted a full redemption arc when the Creation forgives him and no sooner dies from his wounds in that sentimentally ripe moment. The result is a climatic sequence that is dramatically intense, but thematically hollow and, in my opinion, fails the novel.
That being said, it begs the question: when an adaptation diverges so radically from its source, does that reflect poor taste? Or is it simply the nature of the adaptation itself: an interpretation that must be judged on its own terms rather than by strict fidelity?
How about both. Del Toro’s Frankenstein is undeniably imaginative, but I would’ve preferred an interpretation that preserved the intentional rigor of Shelley’s novel rather than reframing it as a gothic romance or a spectacle of horror. His vision ultimately trades Shelley’s moral stakes for immediacy and sentiment, and I cannot help but wonder whether an adaptation that captivates the senses but misreads the ethics of its text can ever truly be faithful—or even successful—on the terms that matter most.
