Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is not merely a gothic tale or a philosophical allegory. It is a work born from the grief of a nineteen-year-old woman who had lost her child and, through unbearable pain, imagined what it would mean to bring the dead back to life. I believe this story remains alive within us precisely because it touches those raw nerves of horror and sorrow—it confronts dangerous knowledge, creation, loneliness and isolation, power and responsibility, our relationship with nature, and the moral accountability of both the individual and society.

With that historical and biographical lens in mind, here’s my first observation: I found the film excessively stylized—at times more like a music video than a gothic thriller. It feels as though the dark grandeur of Shelley’s vision was sacrificed on the altar of digital excess. Personally, I think CGI should work invisibly, supporting practical effects just enough to make them believable, not drawing attention to itself. Instead of feeling as though I were in a dim room lit by flickering candles, surrounded by death and dread, I felt like I was watching a video-game cutscene.

Shelley’s novel was radical because it dared to imagine male appropriation of motherhood at a time when she herself was mourning a lost child. Thinking of this, I feel the film silences the feminine voice that gave birth to the story—a true model of Romantic tension between scientific hubris and divine mystery. A meditation on power, creation, and their cost. That complexity is missing here. This Victor does not seek to give birth to life or to understand God; he wants to conquer death and dethrone Him. The creature ceases to mirror human anguish and becomes merely a vessel of masculine suffering. Ironic, isn’t it—given that the source material questions male dominion over life itself?

I’ll go on with my complaints: the omission of Clerval—the moral voice of Victor in the novel—was disappointing, replaced instead by overused voice-over exposition. The characters of William and Elizabeth are diluted; he’s practically a prop, and she feels like a shadow of her written counterpart. And while I adore Christoph Waltz, his added character (not in the book) further weakens the story’s spine.

Another unjustified change is the removal of the scene where the creature saves a drowning girl only to be shot by her father—a defining moment that exposes him to human cruelty. That moral ambiguity runs through the entire novel. Shelley, daughter and wife of atheists, wrote about the void left by a silent God. The Romantics were living in an era when divinity was being dismantled into physics and laws of nature, and atheism was becoming almost mainstream. Yet existential anguish intensified: God might not exist, but the pain of His absence is real. That’s why this adaptation feels soulless—it commits the very sin the novel condemns. Shelley’s message is that we are the gods who create and destroy. By erasing that ambiguity, the maternal grief, and the awe of creation, the film cuts itself off from the work’s heart.

For coherence, then, the film should have shown Victor abandoning his creation—as in the novel—instead of chaining it like an abusive father. In the original, he turns away in horror from his own act. That rejection is crucial: it makes the creature’s awakening existential and contrasts sharply with Victor’s privileged upbringing, making his deed even more blasphemous. The film’s “birth” scene—with its chains and brutality—leans toward melodrama rather than philosophical terror.

Shelley’s masterpiece endures because she refused to give us just one monster. Victor, his creation, and society itself form a cycle of guilt and despair. In this film, however, the creature is too “good,” his violence overly justified, and the moral tension simplified. Gone is the question—does evil arise or is it made? When he kills Elizabeth, it isn’t cosmic vengeance against divine silence but merely a predictable act of self-defense. Instead of moral allegory, we get a plain hero-versus-villain arc.

I was also (very) disappointed by the attempt to give the creature depth through Ozymandias—a poem by Shelley’s husband, Percy—and by the fact that the film ends with a line by Lord Byron. So the final word, once again, belongs to a man. Apparently, the woman who gave birth to the myth of modern masculine arrogance still needed male validation.

And so I was left with a sense of emptiness. For me, the film doesn’t aim to provoke thought or emotion—it just wants to dazzle visually. But Shelley’s story asks to be seen through its contradictions, through human frailty. Here, everything becomes easier, cleaner—and with that, the tension that makes the novel so haunting and so painfully human is lost.