Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

This time I’d like to break my tradition and talk about the book first, then the 2025 film adaptation from Guillermo del Toro and Netflix.

Fun fact: right up until the end — including at the very start of the book — I was convinced that Frankenstein was the name of the monster. Turns out it’s the name of the scientist. And apparently this is a very common misconception, so I’m not alone — phew.

This is a very layered story with a lot of different parallels and meanings to find. Some are obvious, some are ones I noticed personally:

1. An arrogant person trying to become like God and gain power over life and death.
2. A person so consumed by an idea that they create something without considering the consequences — small or large.
3. A selfish person who creates something and then refuses to take responsibility for it.
4. How the absence of close, loving connections affects people — or how the absence of parents shapes a child’s development.
5. A burning desire for revenge and where it leads (spoiler: nowhere good).

The book is structured as letters and retellings of other people’s stories, which may not work for everyone. The translation I read was comfortable enough, but the narrative is very slow and feels like it’s about everything and nothing at the same time. There are almost no frightening moments — the tension is built entirely on the protagonist’s anxious inner state and spiralling thoughts.

I find it fascinating that this story, written by a woman, so perfectly reflects a man’s desire to find a way to control the process of creating life — something that is only available to women. I’d bet that’s something men have trouble admitting. Freud even built a whole theory around women envying men for having a penis — which honestly feels like projection. Men don’t have much we could envy, but they could easily envy the fact that even the most ordinary woman from the lowest social class can, without doing anything extraordinary, bring healthy children into the world.

I didn’t expect anything grand from this work — knowing how books were written back then, there’s no action, no thriller, no mystery, which is a shame for me personally. So I wasn’t particularly disappointed. I set myself the goal of getting acquainted with this classic, and I accomplished that.

Now, the film! I was genuinely excited when I heard del Toro was making it — I love The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, Crimson Peak and Nightmare Alley. But I’ll say right away: I’m disappointed. Even though I hoped it would improve on the original, which I didn’t love. Here’s why:

Casting & makeup: I suspect Jacob Elordi was specifically chosen for his attractive appearance, and the makeup wasn’t remotely scary. There was no sense that the monster had literally been assembled from other people’s body parts. The romanticisation and sexualisation of everything for the sake of ratings is, frankly, annoying. At least they didn’t give the monster a sex scene.

TikTok scenes: Throughout the film I had the nagging feeling that certain shots were designed specifically to be clipped and posted after release — which was confirmed when I went on Twitter and saw the exact scenes I was thinking of, paired with comments about how cute the monster was. Good for marketing, bad for the film. Though people will probably swallow it anyway.

Weak motivation: Because the plot was almost completely rewritten, Victor ends up with the weakest possible motivation to create the monster — despite talking about it endlessly beforehand. This then collapses the monster’s motivation too, and very little makes sense after that. The constant stupidity of the characters doesn’t help.

Fathers and sons: Because the plot was rewritten from scratch, the original idea — a man’s attempt to play God — got lost entirely. Instead we got a mediocre film about parent-child relationships. Yes, the book touches on this too, but it’s arguably the least interesting angle of the story.

Non-existent logic: Quite a few scenes have no value for the new plot and no internal logic either. The filmmakers rewrote everything but couldn’t even stay consistent with the new rules they invented, which makes the whole thing even more of a failure.

Neither a strong cast, nor beautiful visuals, nor a handful of interesting scenes could save Frankenstein and his monster — who for some reason suddenly turns into a regular Mowgli — from this colossal failure. I have a feeling most of it comes down to Netflix’s involvement and the fact that modern (American) audiences have shorter and shorter attention spans, which is why everything gets simplified and the dialogue keeps repeating the same things over and over, including characters narrating exactly what they’re doing in the moment.