Frankenstein is the monster (movie) Guillermo del Toro was born to bring to life
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Guillermo del Toro has made several monster movies of a particular bent — soulful, swoony, feverish films about grotesque-looking creatures who prove themselves more deeply human than the humans who reject them. Hellboy (2004) was a half-demon with a full heart. The Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water (2017) was an emo f-boy with gill slits. Even the titular marionette in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) was such a mensch that he earned the right to trade in his knotty pine physiognomy for a flesh bag.
Soulful, swoony, feverish, with a narrative that stacks the emotional deck in favor of the hideous outcast — I mean, that's pretty much the jacket copy you'd find on any volume of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, right?
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Which is why this seems like the perfect match between story and muse; certainly del Toro's been talking about making his own version of the tale for decades, calling it his "lifelong dream."
That dream is now realized, and while the resulting film captures the
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