Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Frankenstein makes masculinity more explicitly intergenerational than Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel: it adds a cruel father to Victor’s past and frames Victor and the Creature as father and son. That shift puts a pointed question at the center of the adaptation: does manhood repeat domination, or can it mean care and accountability?
What changes between Shelley’s novel and del Toro’s film?
The Netflix film is inspired by Shelley’s 1818 novel. Netflix reported that it debuted at the Venice Film Festival on August 30, 2025, before its streaming release on November 7, 2025. The adaptation does not simply reproduce the book: actor Oscar Isaac says del Toro refracts it through his own imagination rather than trying to communicate its literal contents. Netflix’s film announcement presents the story through the linked roles of creator, creature, father, and son.
The clearest concrete change for a comparison about masculinity is Victor’s family history. The British Film Institute says the film gives Victor a cruel father who is absent from Shelley’s book. Del Toro also makes the creator–Creature relationship explicitly paternal: he says the film settles it as a father-and-son relationship. These choices foreground inheritance in a way that is especially legible on screen; they do not mean Shelley’s novel has no parent-child themes or that its Victor lacks moral complexity. The BFI’s comparison of the film and novel discusses those adaptation differences.
How does the film connect fatherhood and masculinity?
Victor inherits a pattern of power
Adding a cruel father gives the film a way to place Victor’s behavior within a family history. It invites viewers to consider whether he repeats the domination he experienced when he gains power over the life he creates. That is an interpretation of the adaptation’s added backstory, not a claim that the film excuses Victor or that inherited harm makes his choices inevitable.
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Del Toro describes Victor as someone who turns power into oppression while casting himself as the injured party. “Like all tyrants, Victor believes himself to be a victim,” the director says. The judgment belongs to del Toro; read in that light, Victor’s self-pity does not cancel his responsibility for the damage he causes. Del Toro’s Netflix feature on the film includes his characterization of Victor.
The Creature’s growth tests what a father owes
Del Toro says, “This is one of the salient things that Mary Shelley did in the book, and that this movie does: We track the growth of the Creature into a man.” His point matters to the comparison: the Creature’s development is not presented as a theme invented for the film. The adaptation instead makes that development especially clear through its father–son framing. If Victor creates a life but refuses the duties of care, the Creature’s journey raises a question about what becoming a man means apart from the authority of the man who made him.
Del Toro calls the film a story of parenthood, connecting that theme with father and mother figures in his earlier work. That is his description of a recurring interest, not proof that the film offers a single, definitive answer about masculinity. In a Netflix interview, del Toro discusses parenthood and the Creature’s growth.
What does the novel contribute to the comparison?
The film’s explicit family framing should sharpen, not flatten, Shelley’s book. BFI’s specific comparison is that Victor’s cruel father is an addition absent from the novel; it does not establish that Shelley’s story lacks questions of creation, responsibility, or relationships between generations. The useful distinction is one of emphasis: del Toro supplies Victor with a direct paternal inheritance and names the creator–Creature bond as father and son, making masculinity a more overtly intergenerational lens.
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Del Toro has described his approach as making the story his own, “to sing it back in a different key with a different emotion.” Oscar Isaac’s account of the director refracting the book through his imagination reinforces that this is an adaptation shaped by a particular vision, not a claim to reproduce Shelley literally. Those comments help explain why the film can preserve the Creature’s growth while altering the family context through which audiences read it.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How should viewers read the film’s idea of manhood?
The adaptation’s father figures and creator–Creature relationship support a reading of masculinity as a choice between inherited domination and accountable care. Victor’s cruel father helps make repetition visible; Victor’s treatment of the Creature shows the consequences when authority is detached from responsibility. The Creature’s growth, meanwhile, puts personhood in tension with the neglect of the parent who claims the power of creation.
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- Binding: Hardcover
- Release Date: October 28, 2025
- ISBN Number: 9798337402987
- Page Count: 264
- Dimensions: 9.25 x 12 inches
This is an interpretation grounded in the film’s documented changes and del Toro’s own descriptions, not a definitive statement of authorial intent. Shelley’s novel remains a morally complex work in its own right; the film’s distinctive move is to make fatherhood an explicit framework for examining how power and responsibility pass between generations.
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