Why Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein Is the Most Romantic Monster Movie Ever Made

At its core, Frankenstein is a deeply romantic film—though the romance it explores is often tainted by, if not rooted in, toxicity, trauma, and cycles of abuse. Across its two-hour-and-twenty-nine-minute runtime, nearly every dynamic is poisoned by ambition, cruelty, or generational damage: from Victor and Herr Harlander’s scientific avarice to three generations of Frankensteins caught in a repeating loop of emotional and physical trauma to the Creature and Elizabeth, two imprisoned creatures who become collateral damage in their world shaped by brutality, jealousy and violence.

Monster Romances, Why We Love Them

And yet, amid the wreckage, del Toro locates something incandescent. There are moments of romance so pure—and so monstrous—that it hardly surprises how quickly this film has revived a distinctly Tumblr-coded online fervor. The fleeting, devastating connection between Elizabeth Harlander and the Creature has the makings of a textbook monster romance, and very good makings at that. Their meeting in the dank basement where the Creature is imprisoned by his creator-father, Victor, is haunting and sweet. Where Victor sees only a failed experiment and others see a mindless monster, Elizabeth sees the truth of him—his loneliness, his vulnerability, his pain. Her question, “Who hurt you?” becomes the film’s emotional compass.

It’s no wonder their dynamic has already taken hold across social media (I see you, Tumblr and Archive of our Own). Del Toro, no stranger to monster romances, revisits familiar territory but infuses it with thematic urgency—meditations on choice, empathy, and the longing to be seen. The film’s core thesis on love emerges in Elizabeth’s words: “Choice is the seat of the soul. The one gift God granted us.” She and the Creature choose to see and treat one another with a gentleness and humanity that stands out starkly against most other relationships in the film. Her final confession—“My place was never in this world. I sought something I could not name, but in you I found it…. That is the lifespan of love…. Better this way to fade with your eyes gazing upon me”—lands as one of the film’s most wrenching moments.

The Monster Question: Born or Made?

As in Mary Shelley’s novel, the film continually returns to one question: What makes a monster? Perspective, del Toro reminds us, is everything. The Creature’s introduction positions him as an archetypal horror figure: unkillable, relentless, a nightmare stalking a freezing ship’s crew. But through Victor’s unreliable narration—“Some is fact, some is not, but it is all true”—the story fractures, revealing that monstrosity is rarely inherent.

Leopold Frankenstein (Charles Dance) embodies one kind of monster: the tyrannical, abusive patriarch who rules through fear. Victor, in turn, becomes a monster shaped in that image. His fevered vision of the Dark Angel is less about the mysteries of life and death than about conquering the first monster he ever knew—his father. 

Del Toro visually reinforces Victor’s descent through blood-soaked laboratories that stain even the streets red. Dark, poorly-lit rooms full of dismembered bodies and corpses, often scattered in positions of pain and subjugation.  Those ominous red gloves.  William, the younger Frankenstein, offers one of the more cutting observations that every character soon learns is truth the more time they spend with Victor: “I fear you Victor. I always have. Every… ounce of destruction, it all came from you…. You are the monster.”

Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) represents another (explicitly systemic) monster entirely: the predatory capitalist who views soldiers as commodities in his pursuit of wealth and scientific triumph. His voyeuristic fascination with Victor’s grotesque laboratory—photographing corpses like curiosities—mirrors Victor’s own disregard for human life and even basic dignity.

Elizabeth, by contrast, stands at the opposite pole. Introduced condemning the horrors of war that consume young men’s bodies for profit and power, she is granted a moral clarity that distinguishes her from the men who objectify, desire, barter, or seek to conquer her. Though Victor imagines a romance between them, del Toro uses his perspective to misdirect; their dynamic is doomed by Victor’s inability to escape the “conqueror” role he believes is his destiny. Instead, Elizabeth’s true mirror is the Creature. Both are trapped in lives not of their choosing; for both, choice is the key to self-actualization. The tragedy is that Elizabeth’s choice ends in death, while the Creature’s ends in eternal loneliness.

Throughout, del Toro depicts examples of humanity being casually cruel: sailors eager to kill the Creature without knowing who or what he is, Leopold terrorizing his son and wife, hunters pursuing what they don’t understand. As the Creature reflects, “The hunter did not hate the wolf. The wolf did not hate the sheep. But violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of the world. It would hunt you and kill you just for being who you are.” 

And yet, the Creature defies his inhumane origins and the abuse he endures, choosing to embody something different. Yes, he does commit acts of violence and, at times, gives in to his rage, embodying the very same destructive, domineering animus that drives Victor, Harlander, and others: “I will make you bleed. I will make you humble. You may be my creator, but from this day forward, I will be your master.”

But the true triumph is that he chooses a different path—forgiveness. Toward Victor, to the relentless pain, suffering and loneliness of immortality. This becomes the film’s most radical assertion: “And if you have it in your heart then forgive yourself into existence… what resource do you have but to live.”

On Performances

Jacob Elordi delivers a revelatory performance as the Creature. With striking nuance—often conveyed entirely through his eyes and physicality—he embodies a being who is by turns terrifying, vulnerable, and achingly human. It’s a performance that lingers. And I’m going to say it now because I’m always willing to admit when I’ve changed my mind—I get it now, Tumblr and the Internet-at-large. I really do.

Oscar Isaac’s Victor is almost as magnetic. Even from his first scene presenting research to the medical fraternity, Isaac captures the uneasy blend of brilliance, narcissism, and madness required of someone attempting to play God. If the younger actor cast as Victor doesn’t quite match him, it’s a minor distraction. Isaac never loses sight of Victor’s monstrousness, even in moments of grief or vulnerability.

Mia Goth is a steady, compelling presence as Elizabeth Harlander. Del Toro expands Elizabeth far beyond her literary counterpart, and Goth imbues her with empathy and conviction. The “Beauty and the Beast” archetype is reframed not as a romance of redemption or saviors, but of recognition—Beauty sees and loves the Beast because she shares something of his wildness, his shadow self.

The dual casting of the same actress as Victor’s mother, Baronness Claire Frankenstein, is inspired. The Baronness is less a character and more the locus of Victor’s Oedipal obsession—his first loss, his first madness, and a shadow that haunts every woman he attempts to “conquer,” including Elizabeth.

If Charles Dance and Christoph Waltz feel typecast to the point of distraction, it’s because they are playing slight variations on roles they’ve perfected elsewhere (Dance as Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones, Waltz as Hans Lander in Inglorious Basterds). Still, they bring satisfying menace to the film’s thematic tapestry.

On Production Design

As expected from del Toro, the production design is exquisite. Hand-built sets like the ship and the tower are richly textured and immersive. The frozen landscapes, the gothic laboratories, and the film’s painterly visual effects coalesce into a grimly beautiful world. Costume design also shines, especially in the parallels drawn between Elizabeth and the Creature—her dress patterned with a delicate spinal motif echoing his own.

A (Very Minor) Flaw

If the film falters, it’s in del Toro’s eagerness to explore too many ideas at once. You can almost tell that this man wrote many an essay or literary analysis on the novel, and found something wondrous to explore each time, and he tries to throw almost all of those ideas in the film. Threads are introduced but not always fully developed, occasionally making the narrative feel overstuffed. Yet those same ideas leave the viewer with a wealth to ponder long after the credits roll—and perhaps that’s what good art is meant to do.

In the end, Frankenstein is a haunting, imperfect, deeply felt meditation on monstrosity, love, and the redemptive power of seeing and being seen. It is del Toro at his most ambitious and at moments, his most moving.

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