Del Toro’s Frankenstein: Creation, Abandonment, and the Shifting Narratives
Contains major spoilers.
Proceed at your own discretion.
I. From the Creator’s Confession to the Creature’s Testimony
This
might be the most father-complex film I’ve watched this year, Frankenstein
(2025) directed by Guillermo del Toro. The film was made based on Mary
Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein. As a note, I haven’t read the novel.
So, this writing was fully based on Del Toro’s cinematic work. The 150-minute film
unfolds like a testimony that reveals how deeply patriarchal validation
continues to shape the world, often at the cost of countless innocent lives.
Watching it, I couldn’t help but think: may all boys receive enough affection
from their fathers so they don’t end up destroying everything in search of it.
The absence of such love has already fueled enough wounds in children and
women, wars, catastrophic policies, and other tragedies. It’s easy to imagine
who truly needs this film: some of our male leaders with unresolved paternal
wounds who continue to unleash their issues upon the world through problematic
policies. To me, Del Toro’s visual storytelling becomes an inadvertent mirror
of that psychological pattern: the lack of parental love, resentment in
childhood, the act of creation, the failure to channel care toward that
creation, destruction, and the endless longing for approval.
The
narrative structure of del Toro’s Frankenstein reinforces this
psychological cycle. The film is divided into four parts: the opening sequence,
in which Frankenstein the father and the son are found by a deserted ship full
of crew; the story of the creator; the story of the creation; and finally, the
epilogue. This structure resembles a journey of testimony: the witnessing, the
perpetrator’s confession, the victim’s account, and finally, redemption
witnessed by a third party. I perceive this as a cyclical resolution to
generational trauma born of parental abuses.
After
the creator’s narrative ends, the moment when the creation begins to tell his
own story feels radical. It transforms the viewing experience into something
beyond a gothic allegory about the limits of humanity. It turns into a survivor’s
reclamation of voice and ways of seeing. A story told by the one deemed a
monster due to a different physical appearance and origin. A story of the
grotesque one. A story told after the story of domination by the so-called
human who then reveals himself as far more monstrous internally. A story of a
child attempting to cut the devilish cycle of generational violence and trauma.
I appreciate how Del Toro makes his stance clear, boldly identifying the true
monster: the one who causes endless death and destruction in pursuit of revenge
against a ghost of the past, a deeply ingrained childhood trauma.
II. Crimson Ghosts and Meaningless Bodies
We
see how this childhood ghost takes form through the color red in the film. The
red first appears when Victor’s mother emerges in full crimson amidst the
grandeur of the family estate and countless servants. I can’t recall the color
of the servants’ attire, but I vividly remember her red dress which is centered
perfectly in the middle of the frame to command attention. As the film unfolds,
her death is also framed in red: red blood, a red coffin lining, a red scarf
worn by Victor. His adult life is also saturated with red as well: dreams of a death
angel in red fabric, the blood of butchered animals in front of the gate of his
residence, stains from his experimental subjects, and the red blankets he wore
from sequence to sequence. The color of the blanket changes only at the end when
Victor is no longer obsessed with conquering death to surpass his father’s
ability as the most renowned doctor who, ironically, failed to save his own
wife—Victor’s mother.
Other
symbolic uses of color serve to bind the film’s aesthetic and narrative form:
white for innocence, seen in Elizabeth, William, and Victor upon their deaths;
and black for human ego, seen in the coffin frame of Victor’s father and in the
attire of both Victors throughout the film. Albeit such symbolism might seem
stereotypical, Del Toro’s consistent repetition of these colors across key
sequences creates a powerful visual grammar. It is stylized, but meaningful as a formal narrative structure. As I watch the film, I also recall the emotional
palette of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) who also uses the
color of red to depict the interior of the human soul, especially the psychological
states of the women in this film as they face the looming death of their sister.
Interestingly, two of Bergman’s films appear in Del Toro’s list of top ten
favorites according to Criterion.[1]
Perhaps indeed Del Toro finds Bergman’s crimson as inspiring.
Another
notable discourse concerns the elusiveness of women depicted in Frankenstein.
First, the mother, whose death triggers deep trauma in Victor, especially when
combined with a father who offers only hard love. Second, the woman whose
gentleness and intelligence captivate the three Frankensteins in the film,
suggesting that the sons of Frankenstein are profoundly deprived of a maternal
figure. Third, the angel of death haunting the first Victor in his sleep since
his Mother's death. And finally, the unseen woman who infects Heinrich
Harlander—Victor’s benefactor—with syphilis, which then indirectly drives him
to madness and to his obsession with abandoning his decaying human body for the
grotesque new body Victor strives to create. All of these women always slip
away from the fist of men who strive to possess and mold them. All of them are
somehow beyond control.
Yet
beneath this beauty and poetic imagery about colors also lies an unbearable depiction
of violence. The scenes of bodies being butchered and reassembled into
something “new” (if not grotesque) are almost impossible to watch. They evoke
the horror of real historical violence: human bodies being slaughtered, used,
and discarded in the name of art, science, or invention. The bodies of
prisoners sentenced to death, the bodies of soldiers, the bodies of those branded
as nameless and hence disposable, all as if devoid of meaning.
The
business of murder also intertwines with art and science in the name of invention.
We can see this through the character Henrich Harlander as Victor’s benefactor who works in the arms trade business and his hobbies are painting as well as
photography. Harlander plays a crucial role not only as an enabler of Victor’s
acts but also as the archiver who documents their collective crimes.
I
can’t help but wonder whether Del Toro is conscious of how this juxtaposition—
the grandeur of cinematic spectacle and the trauma of images from real-world
slaughter — collides in the mind of contemporary viewers. Today, we move
fluidly between cinema screens telling the fiction of violence and phone screens
showing actual violence, actual genocide, actual human slaughter. The emotional
dissonance is impossible to ignore, at least for me.
III. The Father, the Son, and the Monster
“So,
you wreck the world only because you need daddy’s love and validation?” This
sentence keeps haunting me after the end of the film. The epilogue comes with a
sequence depicting a father and a son “resolving” generational trauma, which
culminates in the creation of two monsters: one internal monster in the soul of the first Victor and one external monster through the grotesque body of the second
Victor. The resolution happens through a conversational therapy with one witness
who acts as a mediator and a psychoanalyst looming in the room to encourage
confessions and conflict resolution at peace.
To
me, the closure is ambiguously unsettling yet driven by moral
empathy or lessons. Instead of watching a simple monster story, I believe that
I have watched a cycle of trauma born from abandonment and the origins of
violence itself. But can violence ever be justified when it is rooted in a severe
lack of parental love and deeply
ingrained trauma? To what extent is such violence understandable—or utterly
beyond redemption?
[1] Gillermo
del Toro’s Top 10.
The Criterion Collection. Posted on Dect 7th, 2010. https://www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/125-guillermo-del-toro-s-top-10?srsltid=ARcRdnrJm64ZdiyZyIlMtPKA0IC_6AlSOHb4sWFS2wq63t6wEU2bUncc
accessed on Oct 25th, 2025, 14.00 GMT+0.