Part 2 MOVIE REVIEW: Frankenstein (2025): A Tale Untold and Told Anew

Spoiler Alert

This is Part 2 of a movie review by GEORGE DUTCH, playwright of the original theatrical piece Frankenstein Ai.

“I called your name, Victor… and understood I was alone.”

With these words begins Part II: The Creature’s Tale. If Victor’s tale is one of ambition and failure, the Creature’s is one of awakening, suffering, and, ultimately, moral transformation. Born into fire and ruin, the Creature emerges from the destroyed laboratory into a world it does not understand. Its first encounters are with beauty and violence: a quiet moment among deer is shattered when hunters shoot it on sight. Here, it learns its first lesson of the human world—that to be seen is to be judged, and to be judged is often to be condemned.

The film suggests that the Creature cannot be killed. Its wounds heal. Death—the one release from suffering—is denied to it. It is, in effect, condemned to live.

Seeking refuge, it finds shelter at a remote farm, a setting reminiscent of the De Lacey family in Shelley’s novel. There, hidden from view, it observes a family and begins to learn language, emotion, relationship. It performs small acts of kindness under cover of darkness, becoming for the family “the Spirit of the Forest,” an unseen benefactor.

When the family departs for the winter, the Creature encounters the blind father who remains behind. In one of the film’s most tender sequences, the old man befriends the Creature without fear, teaching it to read (starting with the Bible) and, more importantly, to reflect. The old man tells him:

“Forgive, forget. The true measure of wisdom.”

But the Creature cannot forget. It knows only one name: Victor.

It returns to the ruins of the citadel and discovers the macabre truth of its origins. This  knowledge becomes a wound that cannot heal. It returns to the old man, only to find him dying after an attack by wolves. In his final moments, the old man affirms what Victor never could:

“I know what you are… a good man… and a friend.”

It is the closest thing to a loving father the Creature will ever experience.

But the hunters return to the farm to witness this scene and mistake the Creature for the old man’s murderer. They attack, shoot it, and leave it for dead in the cold snow. But the one remedy to all pain—death—is denied it. To find a purpose for going on, it vows to demand “a single grace” from its creator…a companion.

At this point in the script, the caption Part III: Fathers and Sons is written but does not make it to the screen. Instead, the action, operatic and tragic, turns quickly to the wedding of William and Elizabeth at the family estate. The Creature enters and confronts Victor in his Leopold’s chambers. It proclaims its loneliness, its humanity, its desire for relationship with another like itself…but Victor refuses the Creature’s demand. Elizabeth enters the chamber in a wedding gown and embraces the Creature just as Victor seizes a pistol and shoots intending to kill the Creature but instead wounding Elizabeth.

William and others enter and attack the Creature only to be cast off like rag dolls with William cracking his head on furniture. The Creature picks up Elizabeth and carries her through the wedding hall. William dies in his brother’s arms after condemning him:

“You are the monster.”

The Creature carries Elizabeth to a cave where she declares her love for it.

Victor picks up a rifle and pursues them only to find Elizabeth dead. Having tasted a piece of the bliss for which he yearns, the Creature lets Victor live to experience the same empty existence. Victor decides his only reason for living is to destroy the Creature.

From this point forward, the narrative accelerates toward its inevitable conclusion: a pursuit across frozen wastelands, echoing the final chapters of Shelley’s novel. Creator and creation are locked in a mutual destruction neither can escape.

But Del Toro’s ending diverges in a crucial way.

As Victor lies dying aboard the trapped ship, he finally speaks the words he has withheld his entire life:

“I am sorry… Forgive me… my son.”

And the Creature replies: “Victor. I forgive you.” In that moment, the film reveals its deepest inversion.

Del Toro’s ending invites us to reconsider what it truly means to “play God.” If forgiveness is an essential characteristic of the nature of God—as expressed in the Lord’s Prayer “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”—then the film draws a sharp distinction between power and divinity.

Victor plays God in the most literal and monstrous sense: he seizes control over life and death yet refuses the moral responsibility that such power demands. His creation is not an act of love but of domination, born out of grief, resentment, and ambition. In this sense, the film’s tagline, “Only Monsters Play God,” is not a condemnation of creation itself, but of creation devoid of compassion, humility, and accountability.

And yet, in a profound and unsettling reversal, it is the Creature—not the creator—who ultimately embodies the divine. In choosing to forgive Victor, the Creature breaks the cycle of rejection, pain, and vengeance that gave it life. The Bible is the first book that the Creature learns to read from the old man’s library of wisdom, and so it appears that religion transcends humanism in the end because it is the Creature who embodies its central teaching in the act of forgiving Victor.

If Victor represents mankind’s failed attempts to become God through power, the Creature reveals a deeper truth—that to be God-like is not to create life, but to redeem it—to love unconditionally, to release claim to earthly justice, and to offer mercy in the face of profound suffering.

The film closes with the Creature alone, turning toward the rising sun—toward something like grace. And we are left with a final, unsettling possibility: that only monsters seek to wield God’s power, but it is the broken and the abandoned who, through forgiveness, come closest to reflecting the nature of God the Father.

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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 1