Guillermo del Toro, 2018 Golden Globe Awards Speech / Guillermo del Toro, Guillermo del Toro talks Frankenstein, a monster he's known since he was 7 years old
I think Frankenstein (2025) is a movie that is afraid of monsters. Honestly I think this movie is afraid of being alive in general. Which is odd, given that the film is ostensibly about the messy work of creating both of those things.
The monster in this film is beautiful - it has a full head of always-clean hair, immaculately smooth skin, and nothing ever oozes out of it. The only time we see it become less-than-pristine is when someone is actively trying to harm it. The monster's soul is also beautiful; it feeds berries to deer, it helps a family survive out of the kindness of its heart, and it touches Elizabeth gently. It is violent only in defense of itself, which is, as the monster says, not an act of hatred, it's just inevitable, like a hunter shooting a wolf. The monster is a purely beautiful, purely innocent being, only corrupted by the violent whims of ignorant men who do not understand its angelic nature.
As a result, the monster is neither a monster nor a human being, but a secret (and much more boring) third thing - a plastic doll, perfectly blending in with the cutesy, vibrant, wide-angle shots the entire movie is filmed in.
When you see monstrosity depicted in films like Possession (1981), like The Thing (1982), like Crash (1996), there is no mistaking it for something else. You watch the human body split apart, oozing blood and spit and cum and snot. You are reminded of how wet, horrifying, erotic and painful it is to inhabit such a human body, constantly subjected to shit that is beyond your control or comprehension. Sometimes life rips you open and sometimes it makes you cum really, really hard. Sometimes it does both.
In contrast, you have Frankenstein (2025)'s monster presented here, something that could easily be mistaken for a sculpture in a rich man's dining room. The most noteworthy thing about it is how carefully positioned it is - the body is bowed in supplication, forced against the table, but you don't see the consequences of subjecting meat to that kind of strain. It doesn’t ooze or leak or tear from the weights holding it down, because that would be messy and incongruous, disrupting the prim symmetrical arrangement of Victor's "lab." You don't get the impression that the room smells of anything other than old books.
And I'm not chastising the film for failing to be sufficiently gory or "gritty" or realistic - it's very clearly shot and framed as a Disney fairy-tale. I'm not upset that this movie failed to be a Cronenberg film. And there are moments in the film that are legitimately bloody and gory! But I am meeting it on the terms of monstrosity. This is a movie about a monster, who is outcast for being a monster ("they would hunt you, and they would kill you, just for being who you are"), and who is pushed into doing monstrous things, such as killing other human beings. But there is never a monster on screen, only a cherubic newborn, a being without sin.
In this scene, for example, Victor demonstrates the monster's capacity for life to a room full of surgeons by tossing it an apple, which it catches and ponders (like Adam, get it? do you get it? do you get it? do you get it? no seriously, do you get it?). I found myself thinking, what if it hadn't caught the apple? What if it hadn't demonstrated that it already has a human soul, just like you and me? What if it just screamed in agony at being alive? Would it still be worthy of life? The monster seems totally fine with being pinned to a board with its organs on display. There is nothing that marks it out as monstrous aside from the exposed brain and wires.
Which, to me, exemplifies the film's conception of monstrosity. The movie wants to redeem monsters, both human and non-human alike, but monsters must already be beautiful to be worth saving. Scars are ugly, as del Toro points out above, unlike quilts. And because scars are ugly, they should only appear on other monsters, the kind that can't be saved. Monsters only deserve sympathy when scrubbed of all signs of living in the world, because being alive is kind of gross, right? A car crash victim coming out of the ICU - a human being who has survived the incomprehensible violence of an automobile collision - is more hideous than a composite, reanimated corpse. The fact that they are still alive is secondary to how ugly (evil) their body looks now.
I think this is best demonstrated in the film when the monster finds Victor's notes, where it comes to the immediate conclusion that it is "just refuse," born from "a charnel house," and that is what makes it a monster. After being subjected to constant abuse, neglect, and violence for things it couldn't control - things that would, presumably, lead one to think they are a monster - it didn't realise it was "actually" a monster until it found out that icky, yucky corpses were involved in creating it. We're supposed to disagree with the monster about this, but mostly because it doesn't look or smell like a corpse. It's just a hot, skinny, pale-looking guy.
But, if you were still concerned about the monster being too monstrous in Frankenstein (2025), you don't have to worry. The turning point at which Victor becomes "the real monster" of the film is when he is disfigured, losing a limb after attempting to destroy the creature he made. He is redeemed in his final moments by "his son," inverting their positions as human and monster. This is to show the audience, in the words of the blind old man, 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 sinless can redeem the sinful by forgetting about all that shit they did before.
This is the "lesson" we are meant to take from the monster, a warning against harbouring old resentments for past wrongdoings. I'm reminded of Susan Stryker's essay on Frankenstein's monster, where she points out that the Latin root of the word monster, monere, means to warn:
I do not feel warned by the monster in Frankenstein (2025). Nothing of profound importance has happened here. Victor’s conquering of death ends in tragedy, but mostly because we're never shown why death would be an unpleasant fate to avoid - or why being alive is all that great either, unless you can move through life entirely unmarked by it.
As I watched Frankenstein (2025), I thought about the "hideous" scars on my own body - faded chicken pox scars, a cut on my finger from dicing onions with a dull knife, and the modern medical marvel that is top surgery. And I wondered if del Toro would find these things that I subjected myself to, both unwillingly and eagerly, "blissful imperfections," or if I’m just a guy who came out of the ICU.
I think Frankenstein (2025) is a film that is afraid of monsters. By insisting that beauty can only be found in monstrosity if the monster is already considered beautiful, the figure of "The Monster" is left untroubled. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster never makes an appearance in this film. Del Toro has asserted many times throughout his life that he loves monsters, but all I can think of while watching this movie is that he finds car crash victims beyond redemption.
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