Part 1 MOVIE REVIEW: Frankenstein (2025): A Tale Untold and Told Anew

Spoiler Alert

This is Part 1 of a review by GEORGE DUTCH, playwright of the original theatrical piece Frankenstein Ai.

“Only Monsters Play God” is the tagline for Frankenstein (2025 film), written, directed and produced by Guillermo del Toro. It is a striking provocation—and a clue—because “monsters” does not refer primarily to the “Creature” but to Victor Frankenstein, the man who assembles it from dead body parts then galvanizes it to life with electricity.

In this sense, the movie is based on the classic gothic horror tale first published in 1818 during the height of the Industrial Revolution by Mary Shelley, a highly educated teenage girl. It has long been read as a warning about unchecked scientific ambition and the human cost of pursuing knowledge without moral responsibility. 

Del Toro remains faithful to that spirit of the book but reshapes the story around a more intimate and psychologically charged axis: the relationship between fathers and sons. Del Toro’s vision is more humanistic than religious but his adaptation carries echoes of religious origins, especially in his official screenplay: “I was trying to pour into it my Catholic pain….Family, to me, since I was a kid, has been the source of both love and terror….We must break the cycle of generational pain.”  (‘A Tale Untold and Told Anew’ forward to his screenplay.)

“Stop death—not slow it down but stop it entirely!”

Setting the story explicitly in 1857, the film opens and closes in the Arctic, where a ship trapped in ice becomes the stage for confession and reckoning. Victor is critically wounded as he recounts to the ship’s captain the events that led him to pursue and destroy his own creation.

Part I of the movie titled Victor’s Tale, introduces a backstory absent from Shelley’s novel.  Victor is shaped by the death of his mother when she gives birth to his younger brother, William. Victor’s domineering father Leopold, a brilliant surgeon, is unable to save her. Leopold dotes on William while training Victor in a strict and cruel manner to become a surgeon. In the screenplay, Victor even contemplates poisoning his father—though this thread is omitted from the final cut. Instead, Del Toro offers a more symbolic turning point.

As a child, Victor prays before the statue of a guardian angel for protection. After his mother’s death, the statue appears to him in a nightmare transformed into a dark, almost demonic figure, promising him dominion over life and death. The grief and rage he feels about his mother’s death and his father’s emotional absence sublimates into an obsession to conquer death itself.

“Stop death—not slow it down but stop it entirely!” he declares years later in a lecture hall of medical professionals in Edinburgh while demonstrating corpse re-animation and denouncing God as inferior to science.

"into the natural world—unformed, alone, and unclaimed—an abandoned child."

Here too Del Toro departs significantly from Shelley when he replaces Victor’s closest friend, Henry Clerval, with a man sitting in the audience --- Harlander, a wealthy arms merchant and former military surgeon who becomes Victor’s benefactor. He situates Victor in a remote citadel and funds Victor’s experiments with unlimited resources, hoping secretly to inhabit the body of Victor’s “new man” because his is rotting away. In this world, to play God requires not only intellect but capital.

9th Hour's dramatic staged reading of "Frankenstein Ai" (2025)

The creation of the Creature, a brief episode in Shelley’s novel, becomes in Del Toro’s hands an extended and visually arresting sequence—a macabre ballet of flesh, electricity, and will. It is, quite simply, marvelous filmmaking. And yet, for Victor, the achievement is hollow. Having reached his goal, he finds himself incapable of responding as a father to the new life created. He does not nurture; he recoils.

The Creature is chained, hidden, and ultimately rejected by Victor.

“Only monsters play God.”

This is the true turning point of Del Toro’s adaptation—not the animation of the Creature, but Victor’s failure to love it--he becomes Leopold. In that failure, Del Toro locates the film’s moral center: creation, in itself, is not condemned but creation without beloved-ness is revealed as something monstrous. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.” (John 15:9) has long been the model for human relationships in the Christian tradition. But when love is distorted by human pride, fear, or pain between fathers and sons, it often turns against God the Father with a fury.

Del Toro re-imagines Elizabeth to press home this point. No longer Victor’s fiancée and childhood companion as in Shelley’s novel, she is Harlander’s niece, recently emerged from a convent, and now engaged to his brother, William. Discovering the Creature imprisoned in the bowels of the citadel, she is drawn unexpectedly toward it.

Her role evolves into something far more spiritually charged. In the screenplay (but absent from the film), Elizabeth performs an act reminiscent of a biblical scene in which an unknown woman washes the feet of Jesus with her tears then dries them with her hair, and says, “…for your pain, and your divine wounds, I give myself to thee….” 

Elizabeth perceives in the Creature not monstrosity, but purity. When Victor--who has tried to woo her away from William--tries to steer her from this path, she sees in him the moral failings of ordinary men and rejects him with the film’s central accusation: “Only monsters play God.”

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.”

In a spectacular fit of rage, Victor destroys the tower and laboratory with massive explosions and fire. The Creature narrowly escapes from the dungeon, its womb, and slides out through a chute, like a birth canal, into the natural world—unformed, alone, and unclaimed—an abandoned child.

If Part I asks what happens when a man attempts to become God, Part II asks a more unsettling question: what happens when the creation proves more God-like than its creator?

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9th Hour Theatre Company’s GEORGE DUTCH (Associate Artistic Director) adapted Mary Shelley’s novel into a play “Frankenstein Ai" which was workshopped by the company in the spring of 2025 culminating in a public dramatic staged reading, and will be performed as a full theatrical production in May 2027. 

George watched this movie on the big screen in late 2025 and watched it again on Netflix in early 2026 after purchasing and reading the official screenplay scene by scene.

READ PART 2