I’ve always had a soft spot for Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 ‘Frankenstein’, featuring Robert De Niro as the Creature (which didn’t go down too well with the critics), but Guillermo del Toro’s new reimagining is something altogether different – a feverish, Gothic dream that unfolds like a tragic opera about creation, obsession, and the failure of love.

Here, del Toro draws out the story’s deeper allegory about parenting. Victor Frankenstein’s (Oscar Isaac) own father was a brilliant but sadistic doctor – a man who beat his son for not mastering anatomy while he was still a child. That trauma shapes Victor’s own godlike ambitions: to create a being that will never die, so he never has to experience the grief of losing someone like his mother again. But once his creation lives, he abandons it. For all his genius, Victor wants to play God without taking on the role of parent.

Del Toro turns this into the central question of the film: what’s the point of bringing something into the world if you refuse to nurture it? His Frankenstein is not just a scientist, but an echo of his own cruel father – brilliant, narcissistic, and incapable of love.

Like ‘Oppenheimer’, the film becomes a study of a man so consumed by intellect that he forgets how to be human. It asks whether geniuses operate by their own moral code – and whether the inventor is more dangerous than the monster they create.

Visually, it’s breathtaking – full of the melancholy beauty you’d expect from del Toro – and thematically, it fuses art and science, life and death, creator and creation, into one tragic continuum. Jacob Elordi’s Creature is strangely graceful, even beautiful – more soulful than the man who made him – and the film plays with that irony masterfully.

There’s even a biblical resonance here: a touch of Augustine’s original sin, suggesting that the sins of the father live on through the son, that what we try to destroy will always return. In that sense, the creature becomes less a monster than a mirror.

At times, it does run long – del Toro lets his imagery linger – but the result is haunting. Told partly through the perspectives of the two primary antagonists and their shifting points of view, ‘Frankenstein’ becomes less about horror and more about inheritance, guilt, and what it means to be responsible for what we create.

A dark, operatic, and deeply human reanimation of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece.