Guillermo del Toro doesn’t treat Frankenstein like a spooky lab story you file away with other gothic classics. He treats it like a character autopsy. By the time the credits roll, the question isn’t “What have you created?” It’s “What did you turn yourself into while you were creating it?”

Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein makes that slide feel intimate. He starts as a brilliant outcast with real pain behind his eyes, then he slowly converts that pain into entitlement. He keeps telling himself he’s chasing wonder. The film keeps quietly answering, “No, you’re chasing control.”

Victor Plays Genius Like a Performance

Del Toro’s Victor doesn’t come off as a fussy academic. He moves like a man who expects the room to watch him. Isaac leans into that swagger, and it matters because it sets the tone for Victor’s ethics.

A performer needs an audience. Victor needs one too, even when he pretends he doesn’t. He wants admiration from professors, rivals, patrons, and eventually from the universe itself. When admiration becomes the goal, morality turns into a prop you can move around.

The Body Isn’t Neutral, and Victor Knows It

The moral collapse starts long before the electricity. It starts with what Victor chooses to build from. Jacob Elordi’s Creature is assembled from battlefield body parts, a detail that makes the experiment feel instantly corrupted.

Dirty Funding Makes a Clean Conscience Impossible

Christoph Waltz plays Heinrich Harlander, a wealthy patron with refined taste and an ugly business model. He deals arms amid the Crimean War and bankrolls Victor’s work with his own motives in mind.

That relationship punctures the lonely genius fantasy. Victor isn’t operating in a moral vacuum. He’s accepting protection and money that come with blood in the seams, because it buys him speed. When you take that bargain, you don’t get to act shocked that the project turns monstrous.

The Creature Becomes a Person, and Victor Can’t Handle That

When the Creature wakes, the story pivots from ambition to responsibility. The Creature develops a consciousness separate from Victor’s whims, and that simple fact exposes Victor’s delusion. Victor wanted a miracle he could own.

Elordi’s performance matters here, because he gives the Creature a kind of bruised innocence. Innocence demands care. It demands language, shelter, patience, and protection from the world Victor is about to unleash. Victor recoils from those obligations like they’re insults.

This is where the collapse sharpens. Victor stops asking what he owes, and he starts strategizing how to escape the bill.

Elizabeth Shows What Empathy Looks Like When It’s Hard

Mia Goth plays Elizabeth Lavenza, a woman caught in the gravitational pull between Victor and what Victor has made. In this adaptation, Elizabeth is engaged to Victor’s brother William Frankenstein, played by Felix Kammerer, which keeps the family stakes right there in the room.

Elizabeth’s empathy lands as the film’s quiet rebuke. She looks at the Creature and sees a being who didn’t ask to exist. She looks at Victor and sees a man who did ask for this, loudly, repeatedly, and with his whole chest.

Del Toro Turns “Playing God” Into a Spiritual Illness

Del Toro has described his approach as emotional rather than traditional horror, and the film’s energy reflects that. The dread doesn’t come from jump scares. It comes from watching a human being rationalize himself into a monster.

Victor’s flaw is not curiosity. His flaw is rage at limits. He can’t accept that the world has rules, that death exists, that love comes with vulnerability, that power has a price. In that sense, his “science” becomes a shortcut around humility.

The movie keeps stripping away Victor’s self-flattering language. When Victor calls himself an artist, del Toro shows the violence required for that “art.” When Victor calls himself a savior, the film shows the abandonment underneath it.

Victor’s Moral Collapse Feels Painfully Current

This version of Victor lands in the present even while it lives in period gothic aesthetics. He resembles the modern type who talks about changing the world while refusing accountability for the mess left behind. Del Toro has even drawn parallels between Victor and the kind of tech bravado that treats consequences as a problem for other people.

Victor mistakes capability for permission. He confuses intensity with virtue. He believes that wanting something badly enough makes it morally justified. If that sounds familiar, that’s the point.

Victor Frankenstein’s tragedy isn’t that he creates a creature. It’s that he creates a responsibility and then abandons it, while still insisting he’s the hero of his own story. Del Toro doesn’t ask you to hate him. He asks you to recognize him, and that recognition is the film’s sharpest sting.