"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."
"A monster matriculates It's light-years away, for example, from James Whale's iconic 1931 version, which surgically implanted Boris Karloff's lumbering, flat-topped, bolt-necked monster into the culture. Because while Whale was faithful to the bones (heh) of the novel, Karloff's Creature never grew, intellectually or aesthetically. Maybe Whale was worried doing so would rob the monster of its primal power to clomp its way into his audience's nightmares."
Guillermo del Toro consistently creates monster films that render grotesque outsiders as more human than the humans who reject them. His previous works like Hellboy, The Shape of Water, and Pinocchio establish a pattern of sympathetic, emotionally intense creatures. Del Toro considered Frankenstein a perfect match and pursued his adaptation as a lifelong ambition. The film captures the novel's breathless tone and spirit while introducing numerous narrative tweaks, some effective and some not. The adaptation deliberately departs from James Whale's 1931 film, contrasting Whale's static Karloff Creature with Shelley's rapidly self-educating, intellectually evolving Creature, producing a different emotional experience.
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