Netflix’s new take on an age-old story plucks plenty from its originating book and subsequent movies. But while Frankenstein is a well-crafted film with a lot on its mind, it’s also filled with blood, gore and a core message that runs counter to Christian doctrine.
In the beginning—his beginning—all was void, without form. Darkness covered endless eternity.
And then … light. Breath. Sinews twitch. Muscles stretch. Blood sweeps through unfamiliar veins, coursing through castoff organs and patchwork limbs.
A step—tentative and awkward. Another. Another. Across stone, through halls, step by step.
And then he finds him. His father. His creator.
Victor.
So pleased Victor seems at first. And the Creature longs to please. Victor, the creator says. Victor, the Creature repeats, again and again.
Victor. Benefactor, protector, all. The Creature sees no one else, knows nothing else. Victor gives the Creature a coat to ward off the cold, and the Creature is grateful. Victor shackles the Creature in chains, and the Creature is confused. But soon, he accepts it all—the chains, the cold, the sameness of it all—as normal.
But if the Creature’s world is a steady stream of same, Victor is, week-by-week, changing. Growing angrier. More frustrated. He wants something more from his creation—a sign of sparking intelligence, of growing ability, even simply a new spoken word. Something beyond Victor. But no new word comes, no matter how much Victor shouts or berates or hits. And the Creature—bigger, stronger—begins to feel something new inside, beyond love and gratitude and confusion. He feels anger.
And then, like a vision, another being enters the Creature’s bone-cold prison. Tender. Beautiful. Compassionate. She walks to him and touches his hands. She presses his fingers to her throat as she says her name.
Elizabeth.
When the Creature sees Victor again, Victor comes carrying a tank of a sharp-smelling liquid, splashing and spreading it around the Creature’s dungeon-like home. Again, Victor demands a new word from the Creature. And finally—as Victor is about to leave—the Creature gives it.
“Elizabeth,” he says. Shyly. Slyly.
But the word does nothing to check Victor’s rage. Hearing the word, it may even grow.
And then that rage takes form in fire—loud and bright and bringing death.
The Creature, terrified, pulls at his chains, desperate to be free.
[Note: The following sections contain spoilers.]
Guillermo del Toro has a soft spot for outcast monsters (see: Hellboy, The Shape of Water), and in his eyes, the Creature is the real hero of Frankenstein. That’s not without reason.
When the Creature escapes, he shows a capacity for kindness when given the chance. And his best chance comes when he spends several months hiding in a millhouse belonging to a rural family. Though he never reveals himself to the whole family, he listens in as a blind grandfather teaches his granddaughter how to read and spell. The Creature feels a deep affinity for the family, and he becomes a secret benefactor to them—gathering wood, fixing pens and serving as something of a family guardian.
Eventually, most of the family leaves, and the grandfather is left alone. But the blind man also realizes that he’s not really alone—he’s heard the Creature’s scrapings and bumpings for months—and he invites the Creature to introduce himself. “Make this your home, and be my friend,” he says. And the two spend the next several weeks together in pleasant companionship. The Creature later reminisces about this time as the best of his troubled life—when he was a first-hand witness to “goodwill and kindness.” As the movie goes on, the Creature shows his own version of goodness and kindness to others.
Both Victor Frankenstein and the Creature eventually find their way past the Arctic Circle (where the movie, in fact, opens), and they meet a Russian sea captain leading an expedition to the North Pole. The captain proves to be a good listener, and he’s very protective of the people in his care—even when common sense would tell him to take another route.
Frankenstein teems with spiritual themes, Christian and otherwise. And we begin with the movie’s tagline: “Only a monster would play God.”
That monster, as you might’ve guessed, is Victor Frankenstein.
The movie tells us that Victor grew up as a rather moody child, spurned by his father (Europe’s most celebrated surgeon) but deeply attached to his mother. When his parents argued, he would sometimes pray to a wooden angel. But in his dreams, that angel—a “dark angel,” as described by Victor later—visited him and inspired him to seek out the secrets of life itself.
Years later, in Edinburgh (Scotland)’s famous medical school, an adult Victor conducts a macabre but impressive lecture demonstrating what he’s learned. He displays a caustically dismissive attitude toward God as he does so: He believes that science can conquer death and thus “correct God’s mistakes.” The school’s conservative and more pious leaders shout him down and expel him, but that’s no deterrent to young Victor. (The movie emphasizes something we wrote about in a recent blog “What Classic Movie Monsters Can Teach Us About the Seven Deadly Sins”: Frankenstein is an embodiment of the deadly sin of pride.)
Years later, Victor regrets his forays into life and death—saying that once he created the Creature, he found it “unnatural.” When someone asks, “What manner of devil made him,” Victor says, “I did.”
If Victor seems to desire to challenge God through science, Elizabeth—the fiancée of Victor’s brother, William—sees God’s design through it. She says as much, pointing out the “symmetry and shapes” in insects as proof. She wears a cross and goes to confession. And when Elizabeth sees the Creature, she sees not a monstrosity but something far more innocent and pure than the rest of mankind. Perhaps she believes that the Creature is somehow untainted by the doctrine of Original Sin, but her thoughts on the matter go unexplored.
We should take a quick step back and note that pretty much every iteration of Frankenstein—beginning with Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel—is preoccupied with the juxtaposition of God and man. The Creature in Shelley’s book compares itself to both Adam and Satan from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (a book that some believe turns Satan into a tragic hero). The novel’s original title was Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, with Prometheus being the Titan in Greek mythology who steals fire from the gods to give to man. It’s clear why Shelley would see Prometheus in Frankenstein, as both colored outside their God-given lines. All of those comparisons are echoed in this film: Sometimes it’s overtly, as when someone refers to Victor as a “modern Prometheus.” At other times, it’s more subtle: The blind grandfather invites the Creature to read Paradise Lost as the last step of his education.
The Bible was the first book that the grandfather encouraged the Creature to learn, and the Creature says that he embraces the stories of Adam and Eve, the “collapse of a tower and the wrath of a God.” The blind man theorizes that even God Himself had questions. He [God] was curious about death, and “that is why He sent His Son.” But while the grandfather and his family seem to have some belief in God (even if the theology gets screwy), they also cling to more pagan superstitions. When they see the good deeds that the Creature secretly does for them, they all decide that it’s the work of the “spirit of the forest.”
The device that Frankenstein constructs to give life to his creation is shaped very much like a cross—no accident in the hands of a director like del Toro. And metal shards surround the device’s headrest, looking very much like a halo or an exuberant crown of thorns. And when Victor’s done with his work, he says, “It is finished,” which must be an explicit echo of Jesus’ final words on the cross.
We hear references to Roman gods, and a massive relief in a wall depicting Medusa’s head (another reference to Greek mythology) graces Victor’s laboratory. Someone declares his desire to be the “new Adam.”
The Creature is covered only in a loincloth for much of his time with Victor. But before he’s given life, we see his stitched-together body lying uncovered on a table, where viewers get a partial glimpse of his privates. Though not designed to be titillating, other subjects of Victor’s experiments go unclothed. (We see the exposed flank of one body.)
Victor himself jumps out of a bathtub and scurries around his laboratory, completely naked. We glimpse his rear end.
Victor is clearly attracted to Elizabeth, his brother’s fiancée. When he sees her go to confession, he sneaks into the confessional booth and pretends to be a priest: When Elizabeth says that she has sinned—and the target of that sin is Victor—Victor hopefully suggests, “lust?” “Hatred,” Elizabeth says, knowing that it was Victor listening all along.
Victor is not dissuaded. He does everything he can to seduce Elizabeth away from William, and the two become far too familiar—especially given the movie’s Victorian setting. But Elizabeth, while tempted, never cheats with Victor. And when she rejects Victor for good, she tells him, “Choice is the seat of the soul,” and she’s chosen William.
The Creature may be attracted to Elizabeth, too, and she to him. Their interactions carry the signatures of a romance, but the true nature of their attraction to each other remains open to interpretation and enigmatic, perhaps even to them. Is the Creature attracted to Elizabeth or to Elizabeth’s kindness? Is Elizabeth attracted to the Creature or what the Creature represents? The movie declines to answer.
We learn a character has contracted a venereal disease. The Creature demands that Victor make him a “companion.” Victor rejects the request, worrying about procreation.
The Creature may be the film’s intended hero, but he’s a killer as well. Several people (and a few animals) die by his hand, often after he flings them into walls or rocks. He tears off someone’s jawbone and rips part of the hide off a wolf that’s attacking him. In fairness, his deadly assaults are almost always triggered by someone trying to kill him: He’s shot repeatedly, and often people believe they’ve successfully dispatched the monster. Wolves tear into his flesh. Twice he sinks into bodies of water, apparently to drown.
Victor’s attempts to create the Creature aren’t violent, but they are grotesque and inhumane. He introduces his theory in Edinburgh with a partial cadaver—a human head and torso featuring an exposed brain and dangling spine. He brings the thing back to life, and it gasps in surprise and (in my viewing) pain. Victor turns the reanimated being into a bit of sideshow entertainment to prove his point.
His laboratory features other corpses, including another whose brain is exposed, with the skin of his back peeled away, revealing the spine. As Victor’s building his creation, he inspects condemned criminals as they wait to be hanged (treating them almost like grocery produce) and combs body-riddled battlefields looking for promising specimens. (We see a great deal of carnage on those battle sites, including a man whose face has been partly blown off and a frozen horse and rider.) Once the Creature’s body has been completed, Victor drags massive, bloody bags of his rejected leavings. Someone later finds the bones of those bodies, and both scenes suggest that dozens of bodies were used to craft the creature. Someone calls the Creature the “child of a charnel house.”
Someone is shot and killed. Another character falls to his death, and we see him land. A man is killed by wolves. A woman bleeds to death after going into labor. Victor’s leg is gruesomely smashed after an explosion.
As a child, Victor is educated by his father—and punished for giving wrong answers. When he goofs on one, he holds out his hands expectantly, assuming his father will slap a riding crop on them. Victor’s father says that Victor’s hands are now instruments that require special care—and he hits him across the cheek with the crop instead.
One potential misuse of God’s name.
Characters drink wine. A man takes mercury to stave off the effects of syphilis.
A man urinates and asks another person to clean up for him.
“Of all the parts that made that man, which one holds the soul?”
William asks this question of Victor, and Victor is unable to answer. It’s an important question, though, and one that’s inescapable when we’re talking about Frankenstein.
Director Guillermo del Toro has spoken of his desire to make a version of Frankenstein since at least 2007. And it would seem Frankenstein and his monster fit del Toro’s oeuvre like a hand in a red leather glove.
Del Toro loves his monsters, and he wants us to love them, too. From Hellboy to The Shape of Water to even Pinocchio—the story of another manmade creature who is mysteriously granted life—he sides with the “other,” the thing different from you and me. In Frankenstein, he’s given the ultimate sympathetic monster; a creature born of hubris against his own wishes. “I am obscene to you,” the Creature says, “but to me, I simply am.” The Creature never asked for any of this, and that sense of unintended tragedy permeates the story of Frankenstein from its 19th-century origins through its 1930s classic horror flicks and now in Netflix’s Oscar-bait offering.
But del Toro—an agnostic reared in the Catholic church—is fascinated by themes of faith, too. And that, too, is at the center of the Frankenstein myth. Those of us who believe in God know that life isn’t just a product of a beating heart, heaving lungs and electrical impulses firing in the brain: We believe in the soul, the immortal core of our mortal selves. And throughout every story of Frankenstein, that question of soul lurks in every corner, rests on every operating table.
In del Toro’s agnostic eyes, a God-given soul may ultimately be out of the mix. The Creature is better than his creator, del Toro believes, blessed with an innocence and kindness that the world does its best to corrupt.
It’s a lovely thought that some may wish was true, but it’s a thought utterly opposed to both logic and Christian doctrine. We know that a copy of a copy can’t match the quality of the original. We know that we are sinful creatures from the get-go, perpetually in need of a Savior.
Moreover, this Frankenstein film is a bit Frankensteinian itself.
Unquestionably, del Toro has stitched together an impressive aesthetic work—plucking what he found most compelling from the book and the movies and shaping it into something utterly new, entirely familiar and deeply challenging. It reminds us that the director is indeed a master at his craft.
But the finished creation can be horrible to behold. The film wallows in splashy and unnecessary grotesquerie, flirts with forbidden intimacies and finds the time to throw in some unnecessary nudity, too. While the film may deserve its secular accolades, it—like the Creature at its core—is missing a God-given soul.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
