Guillermo del Toro’s highly anticipated adaptation of the Mary Shelley classic, “Frankenstein,” has arrived on Netflix. This movie serves not just as entertainment but as a depiction of a transcendent quantity between human knowledge and obsession with the unknown.

In this movie, as with many of his works, del Toro takes an x-ray of what’s undiscovered. It sets aside the romance and focuses on the raw, complex and profound feeling of secrecy that makes The Creature, played by Jacob Elordi, a true puzzle of a character that is waiting to be understood. This film shows how an ethically unclear being is something tragically beautiful and innocent, an enigma hidden within the body of a supposed monster.

Del Toro, the “master of the strange,” monstrous and truthful, demonstrated that The Creature is the definition of humanity’s failure to contain and manipulate the unknown. 

Dr. Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac, holds an ambition that is steeped in the intellectually known: the laws of chemistry, the mechanics of biology and the promise of scientific control. But by the time his creature comes to life, the idea of control disappears. It is not simply a stitched-together man but a raw, agonizing anomaly, proof that life itself cannot be manipulated as Victor believed.

The core of the film lies in its visceral portrayal of the relationship between human beings and this terrifying void. Del Toro presents The Creature not as gory, bloody and ugly, but as a sensitive, delicate and learning being, immediately defined by disruption and a fear imposed by the way he was created and raised. 

It is not The Creature’s appearance that is truly frightening, but the immediate and primitive reaction of all the people who encounter it. That response is shown as a social reflex: humanity uses the known as a weapon against the unknown. Every scream, every stone thrown, is an effort to return the complex and unknown to the simple and comforting category of “monster.”

At one point, the film reaches an extremely complex moment where The Creature pursues Frankenstein not so much out of revenge, but out of an urgent need for ethical definition. 

He needs to understand what he is and why he was thrown into existence as if he were an unsolvable equation. He is intelligent, eloquent and capable of feeling emotions such as affection, sadness and anger with depth. However, he is constantly excluded from social contact with humans. His loneliness comes from the soul, which is always adrift in darkness.

Del Toro does not use the gothic atmosphere or the details of the era merely for aesthetic pleasure, but to emphasize the perception of moral and medical violation. The laboratory is filled with disgusting liquids and shadows and like a messy and profane altar where Victor tries to bribe the universe to reveal its secrets to him. The creation of The Creature is messy, painful and ultimately undeniably alive, providing an ideal metaphor for the aftermath of the arrogance of a man whose ego and ambition were too big to see the damage behind his actions.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein focuses on the tragedy of the being and the human inability to tolerate what cannot be easily classified, achieving a single goal: to transform a repeated story into a terrifyingly relevant analysis of loneliness, fear and innocence. This adaptation is a significant work without limitations and is a reminder that the true monster is not always a being of dead flesh, but is forged by a society that refuses to see beyond the surface of the unexplored.