Frankenstein: Mary Shelley and Guillermo Del Toro

Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 film Frankenstein makes changes to Mary Shelley’s original 1818 plot, as of course adaptations do. Naturally he strives to create a different version of the famous tale while remaining as faithful as he can to the original themes and essence of the source material.

Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus as a novel is based on the concept and theories of vitalism circulating around 1816 when the story was conceived. Belief in vitalism is a belief that there is a vital force that runs through all life – there were debates around whether this could be secularly generated to reanimate the dead through powers like electricity. Shelley’s Frankenstein explores the complicated implications of harnessing the line between life and death for religion, science, humanity, and the soul.

All Film Images from Frankenstein 2025 (Netflix)

The major differences between the novel and del Toro’s film are the depictions of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. Oscar Isaac’s Victor is crueller and Jacob Elordi’s Creature far more sympathetic. They are opposing figures. The relationship between them replicates Victor’s relationship with his father; he is violent and displays a chronic lack of patience for the Creature’s learning and development. This is exactly the dynamic we see in Victor’s flashbacks with his father. The cyclical pattern of abuse highlighted in the film is emphasised as the product of the male ego and its destructive ambition. Victor’s relationship with his father is not a key component in the novel and it is never directly suggested he was as cruel as the father in this film.

Shelley focusses on how Victor and the Creature – though one appears to be a man and the other a murderous monster – are similar to each other. The Creature feels intense pain and loss in his existence as Victor does. He also causes intense pain and loss, as Victor does. Shelley emphasises that the two characters essentially represent both the good and evil innate in mankind. Afterall, to say the Creature is not like Victor in how he experiences emotion is to deny him his humanity and to say Victor is nothing like the Creature is to deny the monstrousness humanity is also capable of.

This is not to say del Toro neglects Shelley’s original material with his more binary characters, however. The Creature experiencing the same abuse as Victor did as a child still aligns them, just with the innocent, abused, and connected to nature child Victor once was. del Toro spotlights the pattern of learned human behaviours. To oversimplify it, comparing the novel to this film is a nature versus nurture situation: the novel focusses on the vitalist nature of humankind (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is heavily concerned with Romanticism at the end of the day) and the 2025 film is a commentary on societal and familial nurture and what we pass down to generations doomed to repeat themselves.

This brings us to the other important component of the story in both narratives: where women stand in this obsessive male pursuit of immortal glory. In the novel and the film, it is Victor’s mother who teaches him love, life, and connection with the natural world. Losing his mother a young age when she gave birth to his brother is the primary force fuelling Victor’s ambition to defeat death but in pursuit of this he also loses the part of him that is his mother: love and sympathy.

In both narratives, Elizabeth’s representation is clear – she is life and nature embodied like Victor’s mother. I like how del Toro embellishes this with Elizabeth’s love for insects. She cares for the natural world, even the smallest parts and even those others find frightening. This obviously parallels her sympathy, love, and fierce protection of the Creature and his innocence. When Victor meets Elizabeth as an adult in the film he is partially reunited with the happiness of life, nature, and light. (At risk of being a little Freudian, the same positive effect both Elizabeth and his mother have on Victor is intentional by having Mia Goth playing both parts).

In the novel the Creature kills Elizabeth to hurt Victor, but in the film, she is killed protecting him when Victor tries to shoot the Creature. This is in keeping with del Toro’s more binary characterisations of Victor’s cruelty and the Creature’s softness, yet in both versions, Victor never unites his life with Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth is Victor’s potential reunion with the kinder and more at peace side of himself. Nature rejects his attempts to find comfort in it. This is because after meddling with the natural states of life and death Victor has caused a power imbalance in his relationship with nature. By making himself a creator of life he egotistically chooses to play the role of a superior force like God or Mother Nature.

Elizabeth in del Toro’s version is vehemently against Victor’s overly ambitious idealism. She compares his plans to defeat death with the men who decide war will bring about a perfect world, not thinking of the pain and destruction involved in trying to achieve it. She says it is women who take the time to care, love, clothe, and raise the lives that are slaughtered in these wars for unrealistic and egotistical ideas of perfection. The concept of failed utopias is a theme in the novel too – Paradise Lost is referenced consistently. Women take on selfless costs (Victor’s trauma is literally his mother paying the ultimate price of dying to give life and it still isn’t clicking for him) to bring and nurture life into the world and men like Victor want to make life quickly, perfect it immediately, and reap the glory instantly, but they do not have the sympathetic patience to achieve it. By rushing life, you only speed up death. He becomes his father, not his mother.

Elizabeth’s monologue about war in the film references the post Napoleonic context of the setting like the novel does. Utopic political thinking underpinned the Napoleonic wars and only pain and destruction remained. Her words foreshadow the Creature being made from the body parts of the battlefield cadavers left after war.

In the original ending, Victor dies from his wounds before the Creature can reach him. The Creature mourns for his creator and takes his body with him into the frozen landscape, regretting the lack of closure between them. He appears to want to kill himself but the novel ends ambiguously on that note, implying there is no clear future once death is defeated and the meaning it gives life along with it. In del Toro’s very different ending, despite his versions of Victor and the Creature being more opposite than alike, they do reconcile and the Creature forgives his creator. Victor even calls him ‘son’ before passing away.

Though completely different, the hopeful ending still somewhat parallels Shelley’s ambivalent sentiment in her ending. Perhaps del Toro agrees that the nature of man might not change, like Shelley explores, but that humanity always has the option to change and break from learned behaviour. This is reflected in the film’s ending quote: ‘The heart will break, yet brokenly live on’. (Controversially, because it really probably should’ve been a Mary Shelley quote despite Byron’s connection to her).

Yes, in the ending of the original Frankenstein the Creature seems to want to kill himself and we don’t know if he does – it doesn’t exactly have the hope of this Lord Byron quote. I do believe that maybe as a woman though, Mary Shelley was more fatalistic about playing with vitalism, not to say del Toro’s take is wrong at all. I think Shelley’s voice is most accurately heard in the character of Elizabeth in del Toro’s version because whether it is our place to scientifically create life or not is not what either try to definitively answer, but it is their clear belief that unchecked ambition leads to death and the innocent suffer for it. Elizabeth being murdered in both versions because of the conflict between Victor and the Creature portrays this.