With his 2025 adaptation of “Frankenstein,” Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has transformed Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic novel into a sublime piece of 21st century cinema. This monumental film transforms the source material from a cautionary tale about the perils of hubris into a redemptive fable about the power of forgiveness. It is del Toro’s most complete work to date and, without question, the magnum opus of a master filmmaker.

From the outset, del Toro reminds us of the story’s roots in classic literature. A title card reads “Prelude,” after which we see the crew of the icebound sailing ship “Horisont” facing a crazed Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and his superhuman creation (Jacob Elordi). Quickly we realize this is not the beginning of the story but its climax. As Homer did with “The Odyssey,” del Toro has chosen to drop his audience in medias res. Then, having grabbed our attention, he artfully lays out his narrative in flashback.

This structural conceit is not uncommon. However del Toro’s masterstroke is to split Mary Shelley’s story down the middle, recounting events through not one flashback but two. In “Part I: Victor’s Tale,” Victor Frankenstein tells Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) how he labored to create a living creature from cast-off body parts. But this is not the whole story. Halfway through the film, perspective shifts radically as Victor’s creation unveils the mirror image of his maker’s story, as he relates “Part II: The Creature’s Tale.”

In our lives, we know instinctively that there are at least two sides to every story, and that our perception of reality is dependent on our individual point of view. As a prologue to his own version of events, Victor himself admits, “Some of what I will tell you is fact. Some is not.” He then challenges our perceptions of fact and fiction by adding, “But it is all true.” Later, the Creature says, “My maker has told his tale, then I will tell you mine,” an assertion that actively invites us to make up our own minds about what “truth” really means.

This narrative duality is supported by del Toro’s frequent use of mirror images, which are often used to underpin the story and its themes. On the wedding night of Elizabeth (Mia Goth), Victor tries to apologize for the way he has behaved towards her. Elizabeth responds byslapping him in the face. Throughout the confrontation, Victor has his back to the camera so that we see his face only in Elizabeth’s dressing room mirror. This staging cleverly underlines Elizabeth’s perception of Victor – by this point in the narrative he has become no more substantial to her than a reflection. It is worth noting that the scene occurs within “Part II: The Creature’s Tale” – while this may indeed be Elizabeth’s reality, it is also undeniably part of the Creature’s version of events.

This is one example of the many ways in which “Frankenstein” plays with ideas about fact and fiction, truth and lies. Point of view sits at the heart of cinema and, like all master filmmakers, Guillermo del Toro uses not only the camera, but every cinematic tool at his disposal, to shape audience perceptions about what is happening on the screen.

To this end, “Frankenstein” is a perfect demonstration of every filmmaking discipline working in harmony with its neighbor – an orchestra of instruments expertly conducted by the movie’s maestro director. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen makes dazzling use of chiaroscuro lighting so that that every frame of “Frankenstein” looks like a painting by Caravaggio. His wide angle lenses show off every detail of the extraordinary sets created by production designer Tamara Deverell. These in turn provide the perfect setting for an endless parade of ravishing costumes designed by Kate Hawley. The score for “Frankenstein” is surely one of Alexander Desplat’s best.

Within a smorgasbord of lovingly crafted settings, a stellar cast of actors breathes life into del Toro’s screenplay. Oscar Isaac commands the screen as the tormented Victor Frankenstein who, grieving for his mother (who died in childbirth) and desperate to disprove his abusive father’s views about human mortality, becomes obsessed with conquering death. Jacob Elordi gives an extraordinary performance while wearing full-body prosthetics created by Mike Hill and his makeup team. The makeup is designed not to scare us but to arouse empathy for the Creature, while remaining transparent and flexible enough for Elordi to express the gamut of emotions from tenderness to rage, all with a delicate sense of physical awkwardness and nobility. In her dual roles as Elizabeth and (in a distinctly Oedipal twist) Victor’s mother, Mia Goth is simply breathtaking, a young actress who occupies space as fully as any seasoned professional. Her powerful aura, combined with her sublime and subtle performance, proves that less truly is more.

But the magic really happens in all the places where these various elements come together. One of the most intimate expressions of this is the conjunction between character and costume design. Elizabeth’s costumes are not only gorgeous to look at, but also reflect her feelings and motivations, not to mention the film’s underlying themes. A dress printed with moth motifs speaks to Elizabeth’s fascination with insects. The ribbons wound around the sleeves of her wedding dress remind us of the bandages first worn by the Creature.

Victor wears mostly dark clothing, in contrast to the lighter wardrobe of his younger brother, William. This opposition reinforces Victor’s jealousy of William, who was their father’s favorite. “"He was the breeze,” Victor asserts. “I was the storm cloud.” It also underpins William’s naive desire to help his older brother, and reinforces Victor’s ingratitude when he takes advantage of William, leaving his younger brother alone to set up the laboratory while he, Victor, pursues Elizabeth. Later, as he single-mindedly hunts the Creature across Arctic wastelands, the enormous black furs worn by Victor give him a lumbering bear-like appearance – he has finally completed his transition from man to monster.

Victor’s costumes are frequently accented with red, a color traditionally associated with blood and passion. Critically for Victor, this color represents his mother. Near the beginning the film, in a scene worthy of Fellini, we see his mother on the steps of the family home wearing a stunning red dress with a long windblown veil. All too soon the red blood of maternal creation becomes the crimson of death, as she perishes in childbirth. Forever after, in memory of this tragedy, Victor accessorizes his clothing with red scarves, red gloves – anything to maintain his connection to the woman whose death drives his obsession.

The color red also helps to fuel Victor’s newest fixation – Elizabeth. When Victor attends a public hanging in the hope of securing corpses suitable for experimentation, he spies his brother’s fiancée in the distance. But is it Elizabeth herself who catches his eye, or the red umbrella she carries on a day when all else is gray? This uncertainty persists as we remain skeptical about Victor’s growing feelings towards Elizabeth. Does he really love her, or does he just want to possess something his younger brother has? Tragically, because he is more focused on destroying the Creature than he is on rescuing Elizabeth, he ends up killing the object of his affection. All this forces us to ask the question: is Victor even capable of love at all?

The most striking use of red is reserved for Victor’s visions of the Angel with whom he makes a Faustian pact to overcome death. In scenes that only Guillermo del Toro could put on the screen we see the Angel represented first as a sculpted effigy replete with Catholic symbolism and blessed with a uniquely baroque vibe. Later the Angel removes its mask to reveal a grinning skull. Every shot of the Angel is bathed in lurid red firelight.

Other evocative color choices include the cold Arctic blue, expressed both in the icy snowscape around the stricken “Horisont” and in the uniforms of its crew. While Victor accents his outfits with red, his wealthy benefactor (who also happens to be Elizabeth’s uncle) Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) favors warm browns and golds, symbolizing his wealth and decay, in a memorable shot on a corpse-strewn battlefield, picking up the orange glow of the surrounding fires.

The symbolism of “Frankenstein” extends far beyond the film’s masterful use of color. Everything is here by design, and everything has meaning. The unspecified conflict that provides Victor with the corpses he needs to build his Creature is symbolic of war in its most abstract form – despite its Napoleonic-era feel this could be any war that has raged through history. The water tower in which Victor builds his laboratory is as iconic as any remote Gothic castle ever put on the movie screen, with inscribed stonework that predicts the part it will play in the coming drama: “Aqua est vita” – “Water is life.” Inside the laboratory, Victor straps his Creature to a structure that closely resembles a crucifix.

The Creature’s story is filled with symbolic locations. He escapes the “castle” through a water channel – a literal birth canal – after which he wanders through a series of environments that are straight out of a fairy tale. Beyond a desolate wildwood lies an analogue of the Garden of Eden, where he finds sanctuary in a cabin occupied by a family of hunters and plagued by wolves.

It is inside this cabin that the Creature gradually learns how to be human, under the tutelage of an old wise Blind Man (David Bradley) who, unaware of his student’s physical deformities, treats the Creature as he would any lost soul. What a contrast to Victor’s pitiful teachings which were limited to mundane practicalities – how to walk, how to speak. The Blind Man opens the Creature’s eyes to a spiritual dimension in which he gains language and empathy. He also teaches the Creature that all beings – wolves, sheep, and perhaps even obsessed scientists – are simply being true to their nature when they do the things they do.

This is the critical moment when, long before his final confrontation with his maker, the Creature learns the meaning of forgiveness. The Blind Man tells him: “Forgive, forget – the true measure of wisdom. To know you have been harmed, by whom you have been harmed, and choose to let it all fade.”

The Creature’s journey towards humanity brings him ever-closer to Elizabeth. This strengthens the bond they made when they first met in the vault beneath the water tower, when we saw Elizabeth take off one glove and allow the Creature to remove the other, before exploring his scarred body with her naked hand – an extraordinary display of intimacy between two characters so newly met, and seemingly so far apart. Erotically charged, these scenes also serve to align the Creature with the film’s feminine symbology. For example, he loves playing with a leaf in the water – both symbols of life, growth and femininity. Elizabeth keeps this same leaf as a kind of fetish in memory of their pure love.

Whereas, Victor’s journey, despite all his efforts to secure Elizabeth’s affections, only increases the gulf between him and the woman he thinks he loves. Victor is forever associated not with water but with fire. Flames dominate his dreams about the Angel, and fire is his weapon of choice when he decides to destroy the laboratory with the Creature inside it. By the time he has adopted his hirsute hunting-bear persona, we are left in no doubt about Victor’s self destructive and toxic masculinity. 

The film’s thematic strands come together just before Elizabeth’s and William’s wedding, when the Creature breaks into their home and carries Elizabeth away to a cave – a womb-like, tomb-like location that signals a distinct departure from civilization and into a more primordial and primal realm. But this is no abduction and Elizabeth is no damsel in distress – instead she sees the Creature as a spiritual being representing the purity and truth she has searched for her whole life. Tragically when Victor arrives intending to rescue Elizabeth, he ends up killing her instead. Here is the heartbreaking proof of what Elizabeth herself acknowledged much earlier in the story: “My place was never in this world.”

Elizabeth’s sacrifice sets the stage for the final confrontation between Victor and the Creature. At this point, Guillermo del Toro astonishes us with a truly unexpected miracle, as these two broken souls reach the point where they can forgive each other. Leaving the cave, they journey deep into the primal wilderness of the Arctic where, after a dramatic showdown, they experience their final encounter in the captain’s cabin on board the “Horisont.” 

Here, the dying Victor asks for the Creature’s forgiveness. “Regret consumes me,” he says, “and I now regard my life for what it was.” Victor can say this now because at last he recognizes the ways in which he has failed his creation. He has reached a state of grace in which he is not only able to forgive himself, but also to call the Creature “son.”

At long last, Victor Frankenstein has proved himself capable of love.

Victor continues by urging the Creature to live. “Forgive yourself into existence,” he urges. “If death is not to be … while you are alive, what recourse do you have but to live?” In response to Victor’s exhortations and drawing on the Wise Man’s teachings, the Creature is now able to take the next crucial step on his journey towards humanity by forgiving the man who made him.

As “Frankenstein” draws to an end, the Creature sets out across the ice towards the rising sun. As an audience we recognize yet another mirror image, for the Creature must surely be remembering the moment when, shortly after the moment of his creation, Victor opened the window shades on the sunrise and cried, “Face it! Sunlight! The sun is life!”

In this sublime moment we share the Creature’s awe at the world’s sacred beauty, that sense of being at one with the universe. At the same time we feel the Creature’s pain for all he has lost. Perhaps, like the Creature, we have tears on our cheeks. These mirrored feelings of sorrow and wonder, love and forgiveness, are perfectly encapsulated by the quote from Lord Byron that occupies the film’s final title card: “And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”

Dr. Maria Elena Gutierrez is the CEO and executive director of VIEW Conference, Italy’s premiere annual digital media conference. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz. VIEW Conference is committed to bringing a diversity of voices to the forefront in animation, visual effects, and games. For more information about the VIEW Conference, visit the official website: http://viewconference.it

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