Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Frankenstein, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, is a lavish and gothic passion project decades in the making. Yet despite the director’s deep affection for Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, the film is undermined by a crucial misinterpretation of the iconic creature at its heart: he is simply too handsome.
The monster is portrayed by Jacob Elordi, the Australian star of Euphoria and Saltburn, whose casting prompted early skepticism. While makeup can transform attractive actors, as seen with Colin Farrell’s Penguin, this film makes a deliberate choice to present a beautiful creature. As sewn together by Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), the newborn being is a smooth, slender, grey-white living statue. Although assembled from different bodies, the seams are barely visible, and he lacks the traditional bolts and jagged scars.
Initially, in the film’s Arctic opening, the towering monster appears appropriately grotesque, but this is a fleeting impression. As the story flashes back to his creation and subsequent development, his appearance only improves. Thanks to rapid healing powers, he soon resembles a boyband member with poorly applied eyeliner.
This aesthetic choice fundamentally misses the point of the character. In Shelley’s novel, the creature’s defining trait is his horrifying ugliness, which causes his creator to abandon him in terror and society to shun him. “No mortal could support the horror of that countenance,” Victor laments. This universal rejection is what corrupts his initial innocence and fuels his murderous rage. The narrative spine of Frankenstein is the tragedy of a being persecuted solely for his appearance. By making the monster physically appealing, the film removes his primary motivation and the central conflict of the story, a flaw as confounding as a vegetarian Count Dracula.
