Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein: The Father, the Son and the Spirit of Hope

Posted
1st December 2025
in other

As the long winter evenings continue, here is a ghost story to get you through these cold and bleak January nights. Mary Shelley’s genre-defining Frankenstein is a fitting tale for this time of year. Shelley strands her protagonist, the scientist Victor Frankenstein, in a bleak, icy landscape, and sets his creation – a man built from the body parts of dead bodies – on his trail. But alongside this ‘monster’, Victor is haunted by memories. He remembers his parents, his brother William, and Elizabeth, the woman he loved.

Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein is filled with striking, Gothic images. There are dark corridors and candelabras, towering stone buildings, medical drawings and corpses. But underneath this aesthetic, del Toro’s film carries an undercurrent of hope.

While the character of Victor Frankenstein (played by Oscar Isaac) is flawed in his ambitious attempt to master both life and death, del Toro’s film also focuses on the creature’s contrasting perspective. Amongst the cruelty and destruction that surrounds him, Victor’s so-called ‘monster’ (played by Jacob Elordi) sees beauty; he cares for the smaller things, like a leaf carried away on a stream of water, the sunlight shining through a window, a woman’s hand, or the companionship of mice.

In del Toro’s film, Victor’s mother is a beacon of warmth and love in his childhood. However, Victor’s own twisted relationship with parenthood overflows with the violent ambition of his father. Even Victor’s fascination with birth and life – a fascination that stems from his mother’s life-giving force – is polluted by masculinity and the macabre.

The most significant memory of Victor’s mother’s pregnancy, for instance, is at a family dinner when Victor’s father pressures her into eating a piece of bread dipped in blood. As she takes a bite, the blood spills down her chin; she is a victim of a metaphorical death before she dies in reality. Then, after her actual death in childbirth, Victor blames his father (who delivered the baby) for neglecting to do his utmost to keep her alive. The act of childbirth therefore becomes a site of male violence. His father, the parent he cared little for in his youth, becomes the driving force of Victor’s future; Victor decides that he will excel beyond his father’s failings in order to conquer both birth and death himself.

Frankenstein’s creature is born, then, from death. He is sewn together from corpses and electrocuted to life by lightning. But in Guillermo del Toro’s story, this grotesqueness isn’t what frightens Victor about his creation: fatherhood is the real challenge. The violence of his ambition finally falters at the point of fruition. He has achieved his victory, but in doing so, has created a being that he is unable to care for. He has essentially lost touch with his capacity to love; Victor subconsciously longs for a return to the warmth of his mother’s affection (much can be read into his habit of drinking milk), and yet he doesn’t honour her memory by recreating her style of parenting. Instead, he is like his father: cruel and exacting, constantly hounding his ‘son’ in an attempt to improve the creature’s intelligence.

Interestingly, in this adaptation, instead of being Victor’s fiancé (as in Shelley’s novel), Elizabeth is engaged to Victor’s brother, William, while Victor loves her unrequitedly. She also develops a nurturing connection to the creature, visiting him several times during the early chapters of his existence and treating him with kindness.

Victor witnesses this tender bond after growing despondent with his unsuccessful attempts at educating the creature. Victor has failed on two counts. First, he has failed at a personal, emotional level, because Elizabeth sees a purity in the creature that she doesn’t see in him. His jealousy over this realisation is made even more complex by the mirrored characters of Elizabeth and Victor’s mother, as both are played by Mia Goth. Again, it is clear that the childhood memory of his mother’s care has become subverted and twisted. And, still, Victor is overwhelmingly influenced by the ambition left behind by his father; his intellectual failings compel him to try and kill the creature and destroy all evidence of the unsatisfactory outcome of his life’s work. Early in the film, Elizabeth warns Victor about the danger of this ambition, as she proclaims that any goal or idea can easily become dangerous when pursued mindlessly. She is proved right, as Victor’s own monstrous anger is the cause of all subsequent suffering.

In the end, however, del Toro’s Frankenstein leaves us with the hope that the chain of male violence and generational trauma can be broken, if the right things are prioritised above ambition, selfishness, and an endless pursuit of victory. The creature, for example, is defined by a gentleness that remains largely uncorrupted by Victor’s abuse.

And, while del Toro’s predominantly Gothic imagery showcases the macabre elements of Shelley’s creation, there is a prevailing motif of sunlight. The creature’s own view of the world is not so entrenched in pain; even after his journey through the harsh, wintry landscape, this ‘monster’ is able to pause and appreciate the beauty of a sunrise.

The creature does not inherit Victor’s tunnel-vision madness. He is a collection of disjointed memories and emotions – pain, beauty, hope, love, light, loneliness – stitched together and made whole.

Rosie Davis, Elizabeth Gaskell’s House Volunteer