VENEZIA 82: GUILLERMO DEL TORO REINVENTS FRANKENSTEIN

The creature is human, the world is not.

This isn’t just another textbook variation. It’s a Frankenstein that forces you to look inside yourself. Guillermo del Toro revisits the myth and frees it from the dust of repetitive horror: no fetishes, no lazy quotations. Here, the monster isn’t the target, it’s the mirror. And the thrill comes not from the lightning bolt that reanimates, but from the indifference of those who turn their backs.

Jacob Elordi’s Creature is constructed on the body and silence. The prosthetics are present, but they don’t steal the show: it’s the gestures, the effort to move, the hesitations of the eyes that speak of wounded innocence. Elordi works by subtraction: he removes the icon, leaving the being, fragile and gigantic. He doesn’t ask for forgiveness for his appearance; he simply demands the right to exist without being branded as a mistake.

Victor Frankenstein, in Oscar Isaac’s hands, is not a mad papier-mâché genius. He is lucid, almost elegant, in his reasoning of his own delirium. The laboratory is not a Gothic den: it is an altar to the will to power. There, amidst tools and ambition, the film’s most violent act unfolds: not creation, but abandonment. Del Toro focuses on this wound with surgical simplicity. There’s no need to shout: just leave Victor off-screen while his “work” learns to walk on its own.

Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz aren’t just background characters. They carry the desires, fears, and calculations of the world around them: the world that observes, evaluates, and expels. The social map of rejection is condensed within them: order, respectability, the need to pigeonhole everything—and to reject what doesn’t fit. Del Toro knows this geography well and infuses it with his aesthetic: concrete settings, light that illuminates faces, costumes that reveal roles even before the lines.

The direction seeks out the material. You can feel the weight of the sets, the sound of the fake leather, the roughness of the wood and metal. It’s a cinema of touch, not pixels. The image doesn’t please, it accompanies. The music doesn’t dictate: it vibrates beneath the story like a returning memory. The result is a dark, but not gloomy, melodrama: the darkness is illuminated, not flaunted.

The film is about diversity, of course, but it goes further. It’s about our need for control: over life, over death, over other people’s bodies. It’s about identities that don’t match our image, about non-standard bodies that aren’t “exceptions,” but truths we can’t sustain. And it’s about the simplest and most difficult choice: recognizing the other when that other is inconvenient. Here, Mary Shelley’s myth comes alive again: the true horror isn’t the creature, it’s the community that labels it a “monster” and absolves itself.

In Venice, this story found the perfect setting. Outside, the clamor of the red carpet; inside, that suspended silence that comes when the audience understands they’re not watching a travesty, but a film that demands accountability. Del Toro doesn’t moralize, he doesn’t forcefully update. He does something more subtle: he restores dignity to the “freaks,” as he’s always done, and asks the viewer to confront their own idea of normality.

This isn’t just another Frankenstein . It’s one that refocuses the question we prefer to avoid: who really is the monster when humanity is absent? The answer isn’t a manifesto, it’s scene after scene: where there’s the possibility of love, there’s still life. Everything else is brightly lit darkness.

GALLERY