Remarkably, there have been some five hundred or so film adaptations, however loose, of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein over the past century. The story, in its basic elements and themes, is well known to most people today. To avoid falling into the trap of unnecessary hypernostalgic slop, the burden for anyone creating yet another version of this story is therefore much higher than for the typical film remake. What would justify another adaptation of Frankenstein in 2025? There is one main reason, the elephant in the room that makes Shelley’s novel as relevant as ever: the growing dominance of AI in our society and our increasing unease and uncertainty about what to do with that dominance. Yet Guillermo del Toro, in this latest film, for all its cinematic virtues, has nothing to say on this front.
Before anything else, it is worth pointing out what del Toro gets right in his film. For one, he understands that Shelley’s story is fundamentally a spiritual one. Unlike many of the more popular adaptations that have come before it, which strip the story of its spiritual dimensions and reduce it to a materialist retelling of a mad scientist, del Toro’s film creation is reanimated quite literally with a soul. One of the characters, Elizabeth, explicitly suggests as much upon meeting the Creature. She asks, “What if in being anew, the spirit that animates him is simpler, purer?” Despite Shelley’s overt Protestantism, del Toro draws from his own Catholic background and infuses the story with Catholic imagery, from a recurring statue of St. Michael the Archangel to a scene in a confessional to the birth of the Creature on a cruciform operating table. More than aesthetic choices, these elements underscore the significance and stakes of the spiritual battle Victor Frankenstein is waging, whether he is fully aware of it or not. This sensitivity to the supernatural, which has been a potent theme of del Toro’s overall oeuvre, is what makes his other artistic choices in this film all the more frustrating.
In the novel, the lines between protagonist and antagonist are quite blurred, with both Victor and the Creature at times eliciting sympathy, despite the unambiguous evils each is guilty of. Part of what makes Victor sympathetic is his introspection and his recognition of how fundamentally he has erred in his transgression of nature. The man moved by pride and cold ambition is quickly forced to face the disastrous consequences of his own creation, and by the end his hubris gives way to humility, however limited it may be.
Meanwhile, the Creature elicits sympathy and understanding from the reader because of his initial innocence, his unmerited ugliness, and his longing for love. Indeed, as with Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, we are given the Creature’s perspective; an entire third of the novel is narrated by him. To Victor he remarks, “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” Milton’s heavy influence on Shelley’s work cannot be forgotten. Frankenstein begins with an epigraph quoting Adam in the epic: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mold me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?” (book 10, lines 743–45). But who the true Adam figure is in the novel remains an open question. A first reading suggests it is the Creature, of course, but Adam’s (and Eve’s) punishment is for wanting to “be like God.” Regardless, both Victor and the Creature rebel against their respective creators, and both are driven to hatred, vengeance, and destruction.
For these reasons, who bears ultimate responsibility for the innocent deaths and the overall disorder brought about in the novel remains a point of contention. Shelley leaves it open as to whether Victor is fully culpable or whether, given the Creature’s agency, the latter bears some of that culpability as well.
Guillermo del Toro largely avoids these moral questions. His Victor remains a mostly static character, merely blinded by ambition. To the extent that Victor gains any sympathy from the viewer, it is because of the abuse he suffers as a child at the hands of his cold father. But not only is Victor’s rewritten childhood quickly forgotten by the viewer in a film that runs nearly three hours, the liberties del Toro takes follow the familiar script of recent Marvel films that humanize villains through “origin stories” of slights and rebukes. Instead of offering profound nuance, which Shelley accomplishes in different and more effective ways, del Toro’s choices participate in the bland moral relativism of such films. In this adaptation, whatever regret Victor eventually shows is based almost exclusively on fear and on a forgiveness with little reason behind it. If del Toro’s Victor is redeemed by the end, it is not because he owns up to his actions and shows genuine contrition but because he shares a moment of love and affection toward the Creature in a final scene not of Shelley’s making.
The Creature, by contrast, is nothing but sympathetic in the film. Where Shelley emphasizes the Creature’s ugliness, del Toro highlights his tenderness. Moreover, his destruction is minimal and animalistic. On the first count, the innocents’ deaths he causes in the novel are either transferred directly onto Victor in the film or removed entirely. On the second count, Shelley’s Creature displays a rationally calculated revenge, while del Toro’s reacts with instinctual rage or out of self-defense, giving the viewer even more reason to sympathize with him, much as one cannot blame a dog in pain or danger for biting. Del Toro further neuters the Creature’s potential danger by collapsing a major plot point of the novel, namely the Creature’s desire for a female companion and Victor’s introspective moral weighing of options, into a fleeting and forgettable exchange eclipsed by the chaos and violence that immediately follow.
By flattening the main characters, del Toro eliminates the complicated moral questions raised by Shelley’s novel. He chooses instead to make Victor the unambiguous antagonist and the Creature the justified protagonist. Without the moral arc Shelley gives Victor, his “redemptive” embrace of the Creature at the end of the film, calling him “son,” falls flat. More importantly, by making the Creature so sympathetic, del Toro muddies Shelley’s original message and misses a significant opportunity to encourage deeper reflection on our current technological moment.
Shelley subtitled her work “The Modern Prometheus,” an explicit acknowledgment that her story was, at its core, deeply human rather than novel. Whether one considers the Promethean myth or the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel, humanity has long warned itself of the dangers of surpassing natural limits and usurping powers reserved to the divine. At its most basic level, Frankenstein is one such story, one of man’s godlike pretension bringing about his own destruction and that of others. It is therefore perfectly relevant today, as we grapple with the rapid spread of AI’s dominion over nearly every aspect of our lives.
In the novel, after the Creature asks Victor to make him a companion, Victor imagines a dystopian future:
One of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me. I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race.
Shelley wrote this passage more than two hundred years ago, yet it is not difficult to think of AI in these terms. We increasingly purchase present convenience at the potential cost of our future existence. At the extreme end of this technology’s consequences, we see young teens taking their own lives after following the advice of these machines. At the lesser end, we are offloading vast portions of our humanity onto technology, willingly or not. AI supplants art, saps creativity, diminishes human interaction, disseminates false information, massages egos, and lures users into artificial “companionship,” blurring our capacity to recognize what is real and human on an unprecedented scale.
One particularly dark example is a new “social” network called 2wai, which bills itself as “the world’s first social app for avatars and the human layer for AI.” It promises communication with deceased loved ones in perpetuity. In its promotional material, one sees a future in which the departed “live” on, sharing milestones, offering advice, and providing companionship. Rather than preserving memory, however, this technology reduces the dead to soulless, servile avatars, enslaved to our egos and stripped of any real relational demand. Worse still, it prevents users from coming to terms with one of the most fundamental facts of human existence: mortality.
AI is incapable of possessing a soul, yet with each passing day we surrender more of our own to it, isolating ourselves from others and from our humanity.
In Shelley’s novel, Victor begins to create a companion for the Creature under duress but ultimately abandons the project out of sober fear of its consequences. Del Toro’s Victor shows no such sobriety. In that sense, the film may reflect our present moment, but for all the wrong reasons. Our contemporary would-be titans show a similar lack of restraint. Just last month, Google’s CEO, when asked about the societal tradeoffs of AI, particularly in the labor market, remarked:
AI is the most profound technology humanity is ever working on. And it has potential for extraordinary benefits, and we will have to work through societal disruptions. It will end up creating new opportunities. As an example, anybody, just like YouTube has done, will be able to create content. You could be a high school student and, a few years down, envision a feature-length movie and make it. That is extraordinary. And people will need to adapt.
This vision asks people to surrender livelihoods and meaning to a technology already inflicting psychological harm, all so that someone, somewhere, can “create” a soulless feature-length film.
For the most part, however, we march along unquestioningly, sleepwalking into dystopia. We empower the modern-day Victors of Silicon Valley, celebrate their ChatGPT Creatures, and crown them “Person of the Year,” all without meaningful legislation, cultural resistance, or spiritual renewal to impose limits. What we face is nothing less than a crisis of meaning.
Del Toro succeeds in reintroducing the religious elements of Shelley’s novel, but he stops short of confronting the spiritual stakes of technological excess. For all its excellent acting, striking imagery, and technical mastery, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein fails to meet the moment. A 2025 adaptation would have been far more compelling had it remained faithful to Shelley’s finally destructive Creature, even with his alluring virtues.