By Isobel Carnochan, Senior Culture Editor
Content Warnings: Death and killing
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been one of my favourite books since I was a young teenager. To me, Frankenstein is literature at its peak: it has gorgeous prose, a compelling narrative, and is topped with intricately complicated themes and moral wonderings. Naturally, I was ecstatic when I learnt that a new adaptation was being made for Netflix. But, after watching it, I was nothing short of disappointed. Del Toro’s adaptation removed all of Shelley’s luscious nuance and complexity in favour of spoon-fed, vapid moral messaging (a character literally tells Victor “you’re the real monster”, just in case we hadn’t picked up on that already) and outdated gender norms. In the end, all this new adaptation amounted to was a shallow and surface-level attempt to ride the gothic resurgence wave.
Perhaps my biggest problem with GDT’s adaptation stems from the fact that all themes of maternity are subtracted from Victor and displaced onto Elizabeth, leaving the film with a perfunctory ‘mother figures are caring and good; father figures are cruel and bad’ message. Perhaps naively, I hadn’t been expecting sentiments so reactionary to appear in a piece of commonly praised 21st century media, let alone in an adaptation of something that is widely claimed to be a feminist masterpiece. In the original, Elizabeth only plays a very minor part – she’s Victor’s wife, rather than sister-in-law, and is killed by the creature on her wedding night, as revenge for Victor’s refusal to make him a companion. Yet, in the film, she takes on an active and overtly maternal role; she attempts to teach the monster language with care and empathy, engages in physical affection with him, and treasures the leaf he gifts her even after his supposed ‘death’.This was intentional: Mia Goth, who played Elizabeth, has even commented on it in interviews. Later in the film, when the suddenly-revealed-to-be-alive creature breaks into her wedding venue to demand Victor create a companion for him, Elizabeth’s compassion for the creature compels her to step in front of a bullet for him. Slowly dying, she requests that the creature take her with him so she can be in his company, and spends her last words claiming that at least her brief life had purpose through loving him.
I’m all for giving female characters more agency in adaptations… but Del Toro’s adaptation didn’t do this. Instead, GDT reduces women to mothers with the life purpose of dying for their children (the only other mother in the film, Victor and William’s, also dies in childbirth). Of course, this is vaguely thematically consistent with Shelley’s own life; her mother died a week after birthing her, and a year before writing Frankenstein Shelley had a daughter who died within a few days. To Shelley, motherhood and death likely went hand in hand. But, in her original Frankenstein, this idea of motherhood is explored through the relationship between Victor and his creature. Victor, with his own body (i.e., his hands) gives life to another being – a being that is dead, and later causes his own death, albeit indirectly. This intertwined nature of creation and death is uniquely relevant to mothers – at least by 19th-century standards, where gender and sex are considered one-and-the-same, infant mortality rates are much higher, and death in childbirth is a far bigger risk. It’s impossible to subtract the idea of motherhood from Victor and the creature’s relationship with one another, because, despite being male characters, their bond is predominantly maternal. It centres on creation and death as indistinguishable concepts. By displacing all ideas of maternity onto Elizabeth, Del Toro’s adaptation undermines this core theme, making the relationship between Victor and the creature, perhaps the most foundational aspect of the whole plot, one of masculine paternity instead. Whilst GDT’s Elizabeth does experience both death and parenthood, it amounts to nothing more than an acceptance of traditional gender roles – instead of the rich, highly subversive horror found in Shelley’s. GDT’s Frankenstein isn’t a feminist vision. It’s a reduction of complicated and tragic motherly relations into a hollow commentary on paternal legacy and approval. Yes, this idea is deserving of its own narrative… if it were to be done far better, or had actually offered anything original to say on the topic. Shelley provided such a profound and complicated depiction of what motherhood meant to her, and Del Toro perverted it into an underdeveloped, unoriginal, and unnecessarily Freudian take on paternal legacy.
Despite this, one may think that Del Toro’s adaptation deserves credit for its sympathy towards the monster. Yet, the film plays so aggressively on the creature’s innocence that it dehumanises him entirely. Humans are complex – our environments help shape us, and if we are treated like monsters, we may become them. This is, in my opinion, precisely the point of Shelley’s Frankenstein. Yet in the film, the monster rises above the way everyone treats him – he’s depicted as borderline angelic in virtue and purity, with a greater moral compass than every other character in the film (apart from the one-dimensional Elizabeth – who, again, is only there to serve a reactionary and shallow depiction of motherhood). Whilst the creature threatens to “indulge in rage”, the audience only witnesses brief moments of “monstrous bellowing” and slightly excessive acts of self-defence. Because yes, this creature only kills in self-defence. That he actively hunts and kills Victor’s family is vital to the original novel; Shelley does this not to demonise him, but to challenge us to sympathise with him despite this. The morality of Shelley’s narrative world is messy and complicated, as it is in real life, the complete antithesis to Del Toro’s clear-cut depiction of ‘good guys vs bad guys’. The fact that the monster is such a complicated being is what allows us to sympathise so heavily with him – it is what makes him human.
Equally, the Frankenstein family’s deaths are Victor’s fault, even if they are at the hand of the creature. This idea isn’t even hidden in Shelley’s work, but made apparent numerous times. When William becomes the first to be killed by the monster, and an innocent girl is blamed, Victor claims that “during the whole of this wretched mockery of justice I suffered living torture […] now all [of the innocent girl’s merit] was to be obliterated in an ignominious grave; and I the cause”. By having the monster exist as a beacon of pure, uncomplicated goodness, Del Toro dehumanises him and alleviates Victor’s own guilt in the process. All 2025 Victor essentially does is create a being he then treats badly. Yet, 1818 Victor created a being and treated it so inhumanely that its only available mode of human behaviour was rage so insatiable it killed entire families. The original Victor is subsequently, in my opinion at least, a far greater villain. Reworking the monster into a being that only kills in self-defence was completely contradictory to what Del Toro seemingly was trying to achieve. Once again, all of the complex morality and nuance of Shelley’s work has been stripped into overtly simple ‘monster good, Victor bad’ signalling that does no justice to the creature or Shelley’s story at all.
Despite all my anticipation, I was left struggling to reconcile the film I had just watched with my beloved Frankenstein. Worse, still, was the fact that most reviews praised GDT’s adaptation. Had Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation actually been able to bring any substantial meaning to the story, I wouldn’t have minded such dramatic changes – but all it did was offer some superficial takes and bad CGI. In the end, I think I’ll be sticking with the original.
Image by Ján Jakub Naništa on Unsplash