Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives dressed as a Gothic monster movie, but emotionally it behaves like a grief film. The lightning, the laboratory, the stitched body on the slab, they are all here, yet what lingers is not the horror of a creature on the loose. It is the quiet, corrosive ache of people who cannot bear what they have lost and do not know what to do with what they have made.
On the surface, this is a faithful new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, written and directed by del Toro and anchored by Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Creature, with Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz rounding out the core cast.
Creation That Starts With a Funeral, Not a Lab
This film makes one crucial choice very clear. Victor does not start his experiment from pure curiosity. He starts from bereavement. After the death of his mother, he becomes consumed with the idea of overcoming mortality, pushing deeper into forbidden science as a way to outpace the gods that took her.
That origin matters because it shifts the entire story. Victor is not a detached mad scientist who happens to cause catastrophe. He is a grieving son who turns his pain into a project. The lab becomes a shrine where he tries to fix what the universe broke. It feels almost logical in his mind. If death took something from him, then new life will restore the balance.
Victor as a Man Who Cannot Stay
Oscar Isaac plays Victor as stylish, magnetic, and deeply haunted. Reviews out of Venice and early release describe his performance as one of his most emotionally charged roles, with a focus on inner torment rather than cold calculation.
You see loss all over him, long before the bodies appear. There is the loss of his mother, the loss of his faith, the loss of any sense that the world is ruled by kindness. When he creates the Creature, he is not just playing god. He is trying to stop being a victim. The heartbreak comes from the fact that the act which should make him feel powerful only exposes how fragile he still is.
A Creature Built From the Ruins of Other People
Jacob Elordi spends those legendary ten hour makeup sessions to transform into something that looks like a marble statue chipped out of a graveyard.
The result feels heartbreakingly fragile rather than brutish. You can see veins under the thin, pale skin. Scars trace across his torso like fault lines.
That design choice matters thematically. The Creature is literally made from loss. Every limb once belonged to someone whose story ended on a battlefield or in a morgue. He wakes up with no memories yet carries the physical proof of a world that throws lives away. When he starts to feel longing, friendship, jealousy, and rage, those emotions sit on top of an inherited history of violence he never chose.
Grief as the Emotional Temperature of the Film
Victor’s relationship with his own father, with Charles Dance playing a stern patriarchal presence, sets up a pattern of coldness and expectation that he then repeats with his creation.
The Creature’s grief, meanwhile, is more existential. He mourns not only the kindness he rarely receives, but the very fact of his existence without context or consent.
The film’s Catholic imagery sharpens this emotional landscape. Critics have noted how del Toro frames the Creature in poses and lighting that echo religious art, drawing connections between monstrous suffering and holy sacrifice.
The People Around Them Are Grieving Too
It helps that the supporting characters are not simple bystanders. Mia Goth’s Elizabeth, for instance, carries her own quiet losses. She lives with a man more in love with his work than with her and pays the price when his obsession comes home. Festival coverage and early reviews have highlighted how her scenes with both Victor and the Creature give the film some of its most painfully human moments, small pauses where you glimpse what a gentler life might have looked like.
Christoph Waltz and David Bradley also orbit the central pair as figures who bring out different shades of grief, guilt, and yearning. Some offer fleeting kindness to the Creature. Others exploit him. In each encounter, the film stages little experiments in empathy.
A Monster Movie That Plays Like a Break up Story
Under all the Gothic flair, Frankenstein plays a little like a brutal break up drama. Creator and creation keep circling each other across mountains, cities, and frozen landscapes, pulled together by a bond that neither of them wanted yet cannot escape. Every time they meet, they hurt each other more. Every time they part, the loneliness deepens.
Festival buzz has described the film as del Toro’s most emotional work, a story that “transcends horror” through sheer focus on love, loss, and the monsters we make in pursuit of both.
Why This Version of Loss Feels So Modern
Part of why this Frankenstein hits so hard is the way it understands contemporary grief. It is not limited to mourning the dead. The film makes space for the quieter losses that many people recognise, lost futures, lost faith, lost trust in our parents, our creators, our institutions.
Del Toro threads those ideas through Victor’s failed god fantasy and the Creature’s disappointed search for a family. In a world that promises progress and control, both of them realise they are much smaller than they hoped and far more capable of harm. That is a modern kind of horror. Not the jump scare in the dark hallway, but the knowledge that you have hurt the very thing you tried to save.
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.