“It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.”
St Augustine
Del Toro has long been fascinated by outsiders, wounded souls who expose the moral failures of the society that rejects them. Here he asks a piercingly simple question: What would a sinless man become in a sinful world?
Del Toro answers in a visual language as dense as the story he tells: baroque, shadow drenched, at times grotesque, yet shot through with delicate reverence for the human form. With his typical imaginative excess, embroidered fabrics, medieval silhouettes, warping towers, he sets the stage not merely for horror, but for tragedy.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is not simply another screen adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. Rather, it is a serious theological meditation clothed in the gorgeous extravagance of del Toro’s Gothic imagination. The film treats its source material with freedom, not indifference: what emerges is a new study in innocence, creation, and the tragedy of a fallen world incapable of receiving a sinless man.
This Dr Frankenstein is driven by more than scientific curiosity. Victor is marked by the death of his mother in childbirth with his brother, a death his physician father could not prevent. His obsession to reanimate the dead thus comes from a volatile mixture of grief and pride: a desire to redeem what his father could not save, and to surpass him. Creation becomes, in Victor’s hands, both an act of wounded love and of competitive ambition.
When the creature rises from the slab, his first act is simply to imitate. Victor points to himself, “Victor”, and the newborn creature, knowing no other language, speaks the same name back to him. The symbolism, “victor over death”, hangs quietly over the scene, and indeed the whole film.
Yet this new-made “Victor” is regarded less as a son than as a specimen. Confined by chains in a secluded crypt, he is granted neither companionship nor instruction. His unbroken silence becomes, for his maker, an intolerable affront. Rather than revealing the creature’s limits, it exposes Frankenstein’s own: a man whose ambition is narrow, whose imagination cannot detect intelligence unless goodness speaks in his own tongue. Articulation, the single proof he seeks, becomes a reductive test, where all that truly needs be uttered is the name itself. When the creature can manage nothing beyond “Victor”, Frankenstein’s hope soured into fury. Seeing only failure where innocence stood before him, he torches the tower-laboratory and abandons his handiwork to perish. It is the first crucible, but not the last.
Escaping the flames, the creature wanders into the wild. There he shelters near a family of shepherds, three generations in all, who never see him directly. He moves by night, performing small acts of mercy: gathering wood, repairing tools, tending the scattered sheep. They speak of him only as the “spirit of the forest.” Hearing them from the shadows, he learns the grammar of goodness: to serve unseen, to give without recompense.
When the family leaves, the blind grandfather remains. Here the film reaches its spiritual centre. The elder who cannot see is the first to perceive the creature without dread or bias. In Del Toro’s most tender scenes, he teaches the young man to read, beginning with Scripture itself. The film lingers over Genesis: Eden, the Fall, and the Tower of Babel. The creature reads of men who grasped at godhood and forfeited Paradise. He sees his own origin mirrored in the very tower where he was made, a Babel of ambition turned to cinders.
From Milton he learns still more, of rebellion, loss, and creatures who yearn for their creator. These scenes remake the creature into something Shelley could scarcely have conceived: the classical student, receiving not only letters, but conscience. He becomes a soul. It is not a monster striving for humanity, but a human untried in fallenness, learning what it is to live among the fallen.
The idyll cannot endure. Rumour circulates of a “demon” in the wood; hunters gather. In a symmetry both painful and stark, the creature, resurrected from the dead, is nearly returned to death by wolves. Dragged between man and beast, instinct and intellect, he must choose who he shall be. The world meets him with fear. He meets the world with dismay.
Meanwhile, Victor sinks into aimlessness, never having weighed the “after” of his triumph, should he succeed. The final act reunites creator and created at the frozen edge of the world. Pursued less by his creature than by the consequences of his vaulting pride, Victor flees to the glacial desolation of the far North. The wastes disclose the topography of his soul. There, stripped of every fragile tower of pride, he must at last behold the harvest of his own presumption, standing in the silence of the ice.
The scientist, broken, asks for a last grace: that his creature speak the name that once meant the world to him: “Victor.” But the moment no longer belongs to the maker. The creature, who has traced the arc of history from Eden to Babel, chooses mercy. He forgives. It is the first deliberate act of a person unstained by pride. Thus the sinless man redeems his maker not through domination, but pardon. The film ends not with triumph, but reconciliation.
Catholic viewers will readily detect the theological tide beneath the surface. To call a being into existence is to assume charge of its flourishing. The creature’s schooling, in Scripture and suffering, becomes its own case for the dignity of the untried soul.
Some will contend that the film strays from Shelley. It does. Yet judged on its own coherence, it is a grave success.
Del Toro’s visual language remains unmistakable: stylised, theatrical, a neo-Gothic illuminated morality play in which beauty and horror share the same sky. Moments of gore may unsettle more sensitive viewers; but such brutality is all too usual in a desensitised generation accustomed to the products of the entertainment industry. And yet, taken whole, the film’s intensity serves its purpose: a pageant where beauty and ruin coexist, beneath the same vaulted heaven.
