On the film “Frankenstein” (2025)

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is less a story about creating a monster than about unprocessed grief, loneliness, and our inability to bear our own feelings. In this piece, I offer a psychoanalytic reading of the relationship between the creator, Victor Frankenstein, and his creation, the Creature — treating them as different parts of a single psyche.

Victor achieved the impossible: he assembled a whole human being out of dead men's parts and brought it back to life. The Creature was born already large and strong, able to feel pain, fear, and cold — but utterly incapable of understanding any of it. Its body was ready long before any mind capable of making sense of what was happening. The only word it could say was the name of its creator: Victor.

For all his years of preparation, everything happened faster than Victor could grasp what he'd actually done. He had never once stopped to consider the fate awaiting the being he wanted to create — he was too consumed by the idea of defeating death itself. And when the birth finally came, he couldn't bear it: he recoiled in terror and fled.

Unable to master his own horror, Victor chained the Creature and locked it away in the basement, out of sight. He grew angry, irritated — while the Creature could only utter, over and over, “Victor, Victor,” incapable of anything more.

But when we fail to live through something, it doesn't simply vanish — it finds its way out, if not through thought, then through action. This, in essence, is what the entire plot rests on: the long search for that one person who might be willing to accept the Creature exactly as it is.

So what made Victor so inhuman?

Every cruelty has roots in some unbearable pain. His beloved mother — the one truly close person in his life — died giving birth to his younger brother. It was the first, and the greatest, loss of Victor's life, and there was no one nearby to help him through it.

His father, Leopold, a renowned surgeon, had barely been present in his son's life to begin with, and after his wife's death he channeled what little warmth he had left toward his younger son, William. When young Victor asked him about the inevitability of death, his father answered with a cold, bare fact, without a trace of sympathy: there is no fighting death, full stop.

That was when Victor swore to himself he would be better than his father, and devoted his entire life to the search for a weapon against death itself. And he aimed for something far bolder than his father ever dared: not to accept the end, but to abolish it outright.

Creating the Creature was never an act of love — it was a way of sidestepping grief he had never let himself feel. Instead of mourning his mother, Victor built a body designed to hold immortality.

One detail in this story speaks for itself: Victor's mother, Claire, and his brother's fiancée, Elizabeth, are played by the same actress, Mia Goth. Victor never truly meets another woman. He seems to walk in a closed loop, circling back again and again to the same image of the mother he never properly mourned. The day she died, time stopped for him.

There's another thread running through this story: loneliness, inherited like a family trait. Little Victor, having lost his mother, grew up desperately alone. Adult Victor chose solitude for himself — he worked alone, broke with the academic world, kept even those who shared his views at arm's length. And his own creation, the Creature, longed for exactly one thing: a companion, someone just as alone and just as unlike everyone else as it was.

And yet the Creature did become human. Not through explanations or upbringing, but because someone, at last, neither ran nor attacked. At first that someone was Elizabeth, but the real work was done by a blind old man, whom his own family had once left alone in a cabin in the woods. He couldn't see the Creature — and so he wasn't afraid of it.

Sight works as a channel through which fear instantly converts into action: fight or flight. The blind old man simply didn't have that channel — what he had instead was hearing, and he listened. And so, step by step, the Creature learned to think, and to understand what it was.

It turns out that bearing someone else's pain has nothing to do with sharpness of perception. What it takes is the ability not to react immediately, to sit with uncertainty, and not to rush to conclusions.

One more character in this film struck me — the ice. The story begins and ends in the Arctic, somewhere near the North Pole: a space outside time, with no change of season, no shelter, no warmth, nowhere to hide — nothing to remind you that life goes on.

All his life Victor had used science to outrun the thought of death. Now there was nowhere left to run. Only on his deathbed did he undergo the one transformation he was ever capable of: he looked at the Creature as a son, not as a mistake. He finally did the grieving work he'd never done after his mother's death. It was simply too late to fix anything.

The Creature, unlike Victor, could neither die nor age — it was condemned to live forever, and forever alone. And this, it seems, is where the answer lies to who the real monster of this story is: not the body stitched together from dead flesh, but the mind that could never bring itself to accept it.

But the immortality granted to the Creature doesn't pass without leaving a mark on the world. Its story moves a ship's captain so deeply that he turns the vessel toward home instead of chasing glory. This remarkable capacity — to bear another's pain and answer it not with destruction but with compassion — is what finally breaks the chain.

This is a very sad film, with a tragic ending, and it shows that horror is born not in the moment of creation but later — in the moment we refuse to bear what we now have, whether that's a child, a feeling, a loss, or someone's unlikeness to us. What makes us monsters isn't what we create. It's our refusal to recognize ourselves in it.