Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein treats isolation less like a mood and more like a physical condition. The film keeps asking a quietly nasty question. What happens when the world goes too wide for you to matter, or too tight for you to breathe? It’s a story about creation and consequence, sure, but it’s also a story about where people are allowed to exist, and where they are forced to disappear.
Del Toro has always had a gift for making spaces feel alive, opinionated, sometimes even judgmental. Here, that instinct clicks perfectly into Mary Shelley’s world and into the performances from Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Creature, with Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz adding sharp glamour and menace around the edges.
Del Toro Turns Geography Into Emotion
This adaptation leans into Shelley’s sense of movement across Europe and into the north, but it’s not travel porn. The locations feel like stages of abandonment. The further the story pushes outward, the more it emphasizes a moral vacuum opening beneath Victor’s feet. The film’s geography becomes a map of shrinking accountability.
Part of the pleasure is how deliberately the movie withholds comfort. Even beauty feels slightly hostile. It’s the kind of visual strategy that makes you sit up and think, okay, this is not just a monster story. This is a story about whether the world has a spare corner for anyone who doesn’t fit.
The Arctic Is Emptiness With Teeth
The Arctic framing device is a perfect choice for a film about an invented life forced to invent meaning afterward. The opening places us somewhere that looks like the end of the earth. The expedition ship, the Horisont, is surrounded by ice that feels less like weather and more like a sentence. The team built the ship and ice environment for the production, while some sled sequences were shot on a frozen lake north of Toronto in North Bay to sell that brutal realism.
The Tower Is a Vertical Prison
Victor’s laboratory is one of the film’s most aggressive ideas about space. Inspired by the Wallace Tower in Ayr, Scotland and realized through massive set builds, it rises as a monument to Victor’s ego and secrecy. The design leans on circular motifs that echo del Toro’s fascination with cycles and traps. The circle promises wholeness, then locks you inside it.
The tower is also a fantastic visual way to stage Victor’s refusal to be a social creature. He doesn’t only isolate himself from society. He isolates the act of creation itself, as if life can be engineered without community, consequence, or witness. In this environment, the horror isn’t electricity or stitching. The horror is the absence of anyone who might say, stop.
The Family Home Is a Gilded Cage
The film’s version of Victor’s ancestral world is built from multiple real estates in Scotland and England, including Gosford House, Burghley House, Dunecht House, and Wilton House. Rather than feeling like a safe haven, these spaces read as inheritance turned suffocation.
Del Toro does something sly with this contrast. The home is expansive, but emotionally airless. The lab is private, but feverish. Both are forms of confinement. Victor can move between them, but he never truly escapes the architecture of expectation.
The City Compresses the Soul
When the story moves through places like Edinburgh, the film shifts into a denser, damply gothic rhythm. Narrow closes, crowded squares, and looming stone give the sense of a society that can observe you from every angle. It’s a different kind of isolation. You’re not alone in the wilderness. You’re alone in public.
Nature Is the Creature’s Uneasy Refuge
The most tender use of space is reserved for the Creature’s relationship with the natural world. After the lab’s destruction, he moves into forested landscapes and a mill-house refuge built to feel weathered and real. The production used locations in Canada, including Rockwood Conservation Area, to ground his solitude in something organic rather than theatrical. The design even nods toward folklore, emphasizing that his connection to nature is emotional and spiritual, not decorative.
Light and Color Make Space Feel Personal
Del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen shape many interiors with a stylized contrast of steely blues and deep ambers, often created by pushing powerful light through windows to keep scenes feeling dimensional and alive. This palette subtly reinforces the film’s emotional geography. Warmth is often withheld. Coldness is allowed to pool and linger.
The effect is that space becomes emotional evidence. Rooms do not simply house the characters. They argue with them.
Why the Isolation Lands as Real Horror
What’s impressive is how the film uses scale to stress the viewer. The Arctic dwarfs the human body. The tower dwarfs morality. The mansion dwarfs intimacy. The city dwarfs belonging. The forest offers beauty but no guarantee of safety. Each location is a different answer to the same terrible riddle. Where does a discarded life go?
Isaac plays Victor with a mix of brilliance and brittleness that fits these environments, like a man who can only breathe inside the architecture of his own ambition. Elordi’s Creature, by contrast, feels like he’s always negotiating the size of the world relative to his right to exist in it. Goth brings a sharp, haunted elegance into the spaces that still pretend to be civilized. Waltz adds the chill of institutional power, the kind that funds miracles and then recoils from their aftermath.
Del Toro’s best move may be the simplest. He makes loneliness visible. He builds it out of stone, ice, stairwells, corridors, and distances that feel impossible to cross.
Frankenstein uses landscape and space to remind us that isolation is not always quiet. Sometimes it’s enormous, architectural, and unavoidable, the kind of horror you can walk through for miles without ever finding a door.
Rachel Sikkema is a New Zealand-based writer and creative entrepreneur who explores the intersection of film, culture, and modern relationships. Through her articles, she examines how stories shape the way we connect, love and see ourselves. When she’s not writing about film and television, she’s watching Dexter and The White Lotus for the third time.