Frankenstein (2025)

What is faith? Mary Shelley asks the question differently than James Whale or Guillermo del Toro do. This certainly has something to do with the medium, and it has something to do with artistry itself. Shelley makes an art of not showing what is in front of us. She summons the monster, gets the monster’s account, and includes very limited direct description of that figure. Filmic representation makes similar gestures—in the opening title card, Whale credits the monster as “?” rather than the actor’s name, del Toro hides his creature design before the film's release—while giving us what the novel does not. The monster comes out of the shadows and gazes back at us. We study the monster, visually scrutinize the monster, judge one representation against others. Filmic visuality is of course crucial to the medium, as is the relation to source material, whether it is novel, myth, or script. Frankenstein is a philosophical text as well as a gothic novel, just as the gothic tradition is a philosophical one. It asks what is real while it asks what our experience of reality means to us. It asks what we believe.

What is faithfulness? This is a related question, but it lends itself to secular consideration. If the question of faith in Frankenstein relates to hubris, the question of faithfulness relates to ethics. What responsibility do we have to each other? What responsibility do we have to the things we bring into the world, whether they are concepts, objects, or beings?

When we talk about faithfulness in film adaptation, we are thinking about how close the filmic representation is to the source text. Whale’s version carries the philosophical spirit of Shelley’s original (though we should not forget her source material, from tales of the golem to the myth of Prometheus) while fundamentally altering the nature of the monster, who loses its voice—or, we should specify, its language—if not its capacity to reason. Del Toro’s version restores the monster’s acquisition of language—which to an extent Whale did as well with Bride of Frankenstein—and the articulation of the monster’s existential crisis: I am denied my humanity by he who created me, and am rejected by all who see me, so that I am made monstrous. Del Toro also restores Shelley’s story-at-sea frame, though he directly stages Victor Frankenstein’s telling, relayed as it is via the letters of Robert Walton in Shelley’s epistolary novel.

As well, del Toro amplifies one of the novel’s themes to the point of distortion, while introducing a couple intriguing wrinkles. First, those latter innovations. One is a small but promising moment where the monster has an intimation of its several self, nearly accessing memories and feelings of the many bodies of which the monster is composed. We welcome this development and would love to see it seriously explored. The other is the monster’s apparent immortality, where undeath is extended to its logical conclusion. Once the boundary between living and dead bodies has been crossed, that boundary becomes immaterial. This is a promising philosophical matter, but in contemporary film it reads like a slasher or, worse, superhero trope (particularly in a big-budget major release—whereas slasher invincibility is otherly inflected, approaching elemental, sublime terror vs. spectacular, overwhelming awe). 

As for distortion by way of amplification: the subtext becomes text, dashing subtlety and ambiguity. Sure, Dr. Frankenstein in both Shelley’s and Whale’s telling is like unto God in creating Adam. Del Toro gestures at this as well. Whale’s interpretation, though, invites a queer, secular reading, where the creature is rejected as monstrous other by its human maker, which we can read as a father/son conflict and an allegory for being forcefully closeted. Del Toro makes two moves relative to this well established interpretation: he straightens it and makes it explicit. Victor sees himself as the monster’s father, and the creature develops a relatively heteronormative fixation on Elizabeth, who is recast not as Victor’s betrothed, but his brother William’s (by the way, William is a gothic finance bro, but that’s neither here nor there to our point, though it’s certainly part of the family romance). We essentially have a love quadrangle: Victor loves Elizabeth, who is to marry William, and Elizabeth, who is mildly interested in Victor, is really into the monster (promising! but del Toro did monster-fucker better in The Shape of Water). OK, maybe that sounds a little queer, but only if we read the text in a way it’s not really presenting itself. We have no problem going there, but it’s pretty clear that del Toro took a queer text and made it less so in his telling. We certainly have other versions, from Frankenhooker and Penny Dreadful to May, that further explore the transgressive potential of Frankenstein. Del Toro’s vision is decidedly normalizing, and pivots from grand questions about what constitutes life and selfhood to Freudian banality and conventional story closure. See, the monster-son forgives the monster-father. Yes, that other subtext also becomes text: the real monster is Victor Frankenstein, and William comes right out and says it. Then croaks. Which is at least unintentionally campy. Victor also either croaks or takes a nap at the end of the movie. Sleep, father, says son of Frankenstein, who then disembarks, having earned the respect and won the hearts of captain and crew. In one last cheesy superhero gesture, Franky baby gives them a push, unmooring the ship from the frozen story so everyone can go home. Everyone but the monster, who heads off to start a solo dungeon synth project. The end. 2.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson