Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro’s recreation of the sci-fi classic, had its North American premiere at TIFF earlier this year. The film made it to Netflix on November 7, and as a poor opponent of peer pressure, it didn’t take much for my friends to convince me to see Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s monster. 

The gothic sci-fi film follows a similar trajectory as Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel of the same name, jumping between the past and the present to tell Baron Victor Frankenstein’s story. While I haven’t read the book in years, I can’t say that I remember Victor having such apparent daddy issues. He grows up very close to his mother (Mia Goth), and when she dies in childbirth, Victor blames his father (Charles Dance) — a renowned surgeon — for letting it happen.

He resents his baby brother William (Felix Kammerer) for being the golden child, and hates his father for favouring the younger boy. Victor’s anger fuels his studies. After all, there’s nothing like your father’s unattainable standards to provide academic motivation. 

As a child, the ‘Dark Angel’ appears in Victor’s dream and promises that he will conquer life and death. As an adult, Victor (Oscar Isaac) is obsessed with the concept of bringing bodies back to life, and you know how the story goes. 

The motif of the Dark Angel and images of twisted bodies, corpses, and other horrors, such as the nineteenth-century’s sanitation standards, are woven into nearly every scene. Isaac’s egotistical Victor is constantly surrounded by bodies: living, dead, or carved. His character was hard to watch, but that only means it was well performed.

Victor is like a child who begs for a puppy and doesn’t take care of it once he has it. His ultimate creation — a successfully reanimated corpse — should have been a source of pride, but he instead curses its existence for its supposed lack of intelligence, since the only word it can say is “Victor.” 

He defaults to abusing it, physically and verbally, mirroring how his own father treated him while drilling facts about the human body into his mind.

Elizabeth, William’s fiancée, is everything Victor isn’t: innocent, curious, and nurturing, especially to the Creature. It is a tired trope to have a woman be caring and delicate, but she’s also played by Mia Goth, and I couldn’t look away when she was acting. She plays a double role as Victor’s mother in the film, so for all of you psychology majors, do with that what you will.

Victor suffers from a lasting infatuation with Elizabeth, and is unable to fully let her go, even on her wedding day — but who hasn’t had a messy situationship in this day and age? Elizabeth treats Victor’s Creature like a person and teaches it her name, which leads Victor to further abuse his own creation, out of jealousy. 

Speaking of the Monster, Elordi’s Creature is a beautiful, twisted thing. At first, he did remind me of Dragon Ball’s Freiza, with the naked, white, hairless body and deep-set, almost purple scars. Once the Creature starts to grow hair and wear clothes, he seems more like the classic monster of Frankenstein, only this time with an insane healing factor. 

True to the novel, the Creature never receives a name, though his character develops over the 149 minutes of the film. He learns to talk, acquires a love for reading, shares berries with wild deer, takes care of the elderly, and violently murders multiple people. 

I wouldn’t call Frankenstein a horror film, but it was a gruesome and tragic retelling of the sci-fi staple. Through a new creative lens, the lifelong battle between Victor and his monster made for a really stunning work of art. If you’re any sort of del Toro fan, or if you have a soft spot for unsettling body horror and dysfunctional, arrogant men, Frankenstein might be the next film for you.