Frankenstein is not a film you simply watch once. It’s a film you return to
When Guillermo del Toro makes a film, he doesn’t just adapt a story — he inhabits it.
His Frankenstein is not a film you simply watch once. It’s a film you return to.
Del Toro understands that cinema can hold many layers at once. Some scenes are so dense, so carefully composed, that they demand two experiences: first, on the big screen, where emotion and scale take over — and later, at home, on a streaming platform, where you can stop, rewind, and decode everything happening inside a single shot.
Del Toro fills the frame the way a painter fills a canvas. Every corner matters. Every shadow carries meaning. You don’t just follow the story — you read the image.
This obsession with monsters is not new in his work. From Cronos to The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, and Crimson Peak, del Toro has always treated monsters not as threats, but as mirrors.
His monsters are emotional beings. Fragile. Lonely. Often more human than the humans around them.
In Frankenstein, that idea reaches maturity. The creature is not simply tragic — it is layered, shaped by gaze, space, and silence. Del Toro isn’t interested in fear. He’s interested in empathy.
There is also something deeply personal here, something that feels born long before the film itself — and that brings me to del Toro’s notebooks.
His notebooks are works of art on their own. They remind me of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches — part science, part dream — and also of Jean-Luc Godard’s notebooks, where cinema, philosophy, drawings, and fragmented thoughts coexist on the same page.
You feel that Frankenstein was first drawn, written, and dreamed before it was filmed. The movie carries that handcrafted soul.
Technically, the film is astonishing.
The camera moves with intention, never showing off, always guiding our eye.
The lighting sculpts faces and bodies like classical painting — light as emotion, shadow as doubt.
The sound design breathes with the characters: silence is as important as noise, and the atmosphere often speaks louder than dialogue.
The costumes deserve special attention. They don’t just place us in a period — they express psychology. Fabric, weight, and texture become storytelling tools, reinforcing the idea that this world is tactile, lived-in, and fragile.
The monster wants something deceptively simple — and impossibly complex: to be seen as human. Not tolerated. Not studied. Not feared. Seen.
Del Toro turns death into a privilege. To die is to belong to the human cycle — birth, love, loss, and end. The monster is excluded from this rhythm. He is frozen in time, rejected by a world that defines humanity through its limits.
And yet, his suffering is not only about mortality. Like Adam before Eve, he awakens alone, and he demands a companion from his creator:
“Create someone like me.”
This is not arrogance or desire — it is the essential need to belong, to be recognized, to share existence. Without this, he remains incomplete, trapped between being and nothingness.
Del Toro reflects on human nature through the small and the vast. A wolf attacks a sheep — instinct at its purest. Humans, however, often choose cruelty while calling it morality, justice, or order. Monstrosity is not in appearance, but in the refusal to recognize the other.
And then there are the eyes.
Eyes that look. Eyes that judge. Eyes that deny or accept.
The monster’s tragedy is carried in the gaze — to be denied a gaze is to be erased, to be seen with empathy is to live. Del Toro transforms looking into a moral act:
Who deserves to be human?
When the monster asks for love, for death, for a companion —
we are left to confront ourselves: what does our gaze reveal about us?
In Frankenstein, creation is not merely biological. It is ethical. It is relational. The act of seeing, acknowledging, and responding to the other is what defines our shared humanity. Del Toro’s vision reminds us that the most profound horror is not in the monstrous form, but in the failure to recognize the human in another.
