(Spoilers for Frankenstein 2025)
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein starring Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the creature finally released to the general audience this past weekend on Netflix. It came out to fantastic reviews, with a rotten tomatoes score of 85% by critics and 95% by fans. While this movie is loved for its accuracy to the original novel by Mary Shelley, how does it shape up in comparison? Personally, I felt that while the movie was more book accurate than other portrayals of the story, such as the 1931 movie, it wasn’t accurate enough, and should be seen as its own story.
Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel presented Frankenstein’s creature as an intelligent, emotional, and sympathetic character, a portrayal that has been largely forgotten due to Universal Pictures’ 1931 movie that presented him as a brutish monster. Frankenstein (2025) returned to Shelley’s original view for the character, making him sympathetic and emotional once again. Thematically, Guillermo del Toro changed many of the founding ideas that made Shelley’s novel the classic it is today. One of the largest of these was focusing on the themes of innocence and cycles of abuse. The movie begins Frankenstein’s story with his father, who is physically abusive towards young Victor, a behavior that he subsequently carries into his adult life. After creating his creature, Frankenstein begins beating it when he is frustrated by its inability to learn anything other than his name “Victor”. The movie presents the creature as a much more innocent character than in the book, where it is much more fueled on exacting revenge on its creator, killing all of Victor’s loved ones. Similarly, the movie makes Victor a much less redeemable character, posing him as selfish and antagonistic for a majority of the movie.
Another large change made for the movie is the appearance of the creature and how characters react to it. When the creature comes to life, rather than feeling terrified and abandoning the creature as he does in the book, Victor is amazed by his creation and begins to care for it and try to teach it. One of the biggest recurring ideas in the novel is that of the creature’s grotesque appearance that makes it so he can never be accepted by humanity. The movie keeps this idea a few times with random characters fearing him, but has much more time with characters connecting with the creature rather than fearing it. The largest of this is Victor Frankenstein’s love interest Elizabeth Lavenza, who empathizes with the creature. She is one of the characters most changed for the movie, made to be the fiancé of Victor’s brother William, rather than Victor’s fiancé as she is in the novel. This adds an unneeded love triangle that feels awkward, and I feel takes away from the more important aspects of the plot.
The largest change that I felt took away from the meaning of the story is the movie’s ending. Shelley’s novel does not have a happy ending in any way it can be interpreted. Victor Frankenstein dies, miserable, and loathing his creature. Upon finding him dead, the creature confesses that it simply wanted to feel loved, and it hated itself more than the world hated it. The novel ends with the creature ending its own life by burning itself to death. The movie completely changes this by having the creature reach Victor before his death and speaking to him. Victor Frankenstein apologizes to his creature and embraces him as his son, allowing him to die happily, and fulfilled, then the creature leaves to live on knowing that it can be loved and be human. This happier ending completely changes the story of Frankenstein, making it a completely different adaptation from the story fans of the novel know. Overall, Frankenstein 2025 was a very enjoyable movie on its own, but its praise for accuracy to the novel is undeserved and is rather its own story that should be enjoyed without comparison.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/frankenstein_2025
