Byronically

"GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S new film adaptation of Frankenstein, 2025, hews closely to Mary Shelley's 1818 novel while weaving in design elements and plot points from its many cinematic afterlives. But, more than anything, it is a film that feels obsessed with the infamous night that the novel was first imagined, and deviates from its source material mostly to refine its point that the monster here is actually Victor Frankenstein and the Creature is a wholly innocent victim of his maker's cruelty."

"The story of Frankenstein's inception begins with Shelley vacationing at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva with her stepsister Claire and her soon-to-be-husband, Percy, alongside writer John Polidori and the owner of the villa, Lord Byron. Byron was a luminary of the Romantic movement, equally famous for his rakish behavior, mounting debts, rumors of incestuous affairs, and bellicose, passionate temperament (from which we derive the term "Byronic")."

"Shelley and Byron had a complicated friendship, equal parts admiration and revulsion, strained by his affair with Claire and growing tensions with Percy (during that summer, Percy wrote that Byron was "a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds"). But at Villa Diodati, they were rained in during the unseasonably cold summer of 1816."

Guillermo del Toro's 2025 Frankenstein closely follows Mary Shelley's 1818 novel while incorporating design elements and plot points from cinematic adaptations. The film centers on the infamous night at Villa Diodati where the novel was conceived and emphasizes that Victor Frankenstein functions as the true monster. The Creature is portrayed as an innocent victim of Victor's cruelty. The narrative traces the gathering at Villa Diodati, including Claire, Percy, John Polidori, and Lord Byron. Byron's rakish behavior, debts, rumored affairs, and bellicose temperament contrast with Shelley's sorrow-soaked, femme-coded Romanticism. The cold summer of 1816, driven by Mount Tambora's eruption, forms the atmospheric backdrop for the creative contest that produced Frankenstein.

Read at Artforum