Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
It is merely a co-incidence that I decided to read Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ the same year Guillermo del Toro’s retelling of the classic tale came out on the screens. The director makes several changes to the 1818 story in his 2025 film and I am going to quickly write about 12 of them. Brace for major story spoilers, in-fact, the differences might add up to the entire plot.
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1. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein opens with Victor Frankenstein lying injured in the arctic ice as a stranded ship crew rescues him from what looks like a silhouette of a monster. Soon, at least six men are killed by a gigantic, deformed man, confirming the savage nature of the being, who is in clear pursuit of Victor. In the novel, the creature doesn’t kill any of the crew, and in-fact doesn’t even appear in front of any of them until the climactic chapters.
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2. Just like the book, Victor Frankenstein starts to recall his story to the ship’s captain, starting from his childhood days. But in a major difference, in the movie, Victor describes his father as a cold, strict, distant father, rarely available at home. However, in the book, the father is doting and overtly indulgent of Victor, a supportive paternal figure full of affection. So the father-son relationship is extremely different in Del Toro’s live-action retelling.
3. In another very interesting difference, Victor’s father is a former government employee in the book, but is a successful doctor in the film. So, in Del Toro’s film, senior Frankenstein tutors Victor in biology, expecting his son to be a doctor too. And when Victor’s father is unable to save his mother’s life during childbirth, Victor becomes convinced that his father didn’t try hard enough and decides to conquer death when he grows up. It’s his bitter relationship with his father that drives Victor’s ambition to create life in the film, while Mary Shelley doesn’t offer such a strong personal agenda in her ‘Frankenstein’.
4. Victor has two younger brothers and an adoptive sister Elizabeth in the book, in the film, he just has one baby brother – William Frankenstein. But here’s the big difference, Victor marries Elizabeth in the book, which was slightly weird, since they grow up like siblings, so it was nice to see Guillermo del Toro simply making the two of them unrelated. In the film, Victor doesn’t even know Elizabeth until she is engaged to William, although Victor does find himself attracted to her.
5. A major shift from the novel, and one that transforms Victor’s psychological journey in the film is the fact that his quest to breathe life into corpses is openly known to people around him. Unlike the book, where Victor Frankenstein toils away secretly, completely alone in his gory quest of sourcing fresh body parts, in the film he has the active support of a few characters, including that of his brother William. Thus, movie Victor doesn’t experience the excruciating mental turmoil of his bookish counterpart, who is alone in knowing he has created a ‘monster’.
6. The film introduces some completely new characters, the most important being Harlander, a wealthy man who introduces himself as Elizabeth’s uncle and offers to fund Victor’s endeavor to make a man from scratch. He also helps him set up a laboratory of sorts in a tower to carry his experiments. In-fact, in a major twist that doesn’t exist in the book, Victor accidentally kills Harlander, and then outright lies and blames the creature for it.
7. Okay, this is one of my favorite changes in the film: Victor Frankenstein doesn’t abandon the creature in horror as soon as the poor being comes to life. It was something that made little sense in the book: Victor works on the creature for months, surely he can SEE what he is putting together, so why is he so shocked and grossed out by its appearance? So much so that he faints and flees from the scene, leaving the clueless creature to fend for himself.
But in Del Toro’s version, Victor is thrilled to see his creature come to life, and he attempts to train the being, even though he isn’t good at it. The two also live together for a few weeks, which builds some sort of bond beyond just a creator who instantly abandons his creation.
8. Another big difference between the book and the 2025 Frankenstein film is the fact that Del Toro’s Victor is in his 30s, clearly a lot older than Shelley’s protagonist, who was only 22 or 23 at the time of creating his ‘monster’. This also makes the movie Frankenstein far more skilled, meticulous, experienced, and confident. His creature is carefully crafted, and even though he is larger than the average human being, he is quite symmetrical, and not as hideously grotesque as described in the novel.
9. There’s a fleeting bond between the creature and Elizabeth in the film, but there is no such thing in the novel. In Del Toro’s story, the young and devout Elizabeth is deeply moved when she meets the creature, considering him a miracle, a pure being untainted by the human world. She sees him like a child, someone who deserves kindness and nurturing.
10. In the film version, the creature doesn’t deliberately murder anyone and only kills in self-defense, unlike in the book, where he strangles Victor’s baby brother William to death as an act of revenge against his cruel creator. This was another plot detail in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ that didn’t sit well with me, because just before he commits the murder, he is shown as a kind being who has finally learned to read and understand humanity, yet he acts against his newly formed sentient and benevolent nature.
To make things worse, the creature goes as far as to frame an innocent young woman for the murder of the boy in the book. In the film, it’s Victor who often frames the creature for all his mistakes. For instance, he ends up shooting Elizabeth accidentally on her wedding day, but accuses the creature of murder when her bleeding body is discovered.
11. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein plays out like a cautionary tale against hubris, unchecked ambition, and the dangers of playing God. Through her narrative, she also establishes that a creator must be responsible for their creation or suffer the consequences. Del Toro’s script changes, especially the altered father-son relationship between Victor and his father, makes his version of ‘Frankenstein’ equally about dysfunctional parental dynamics and bad parenting.
In the film, Victor exasperatedly tells his brother that he never really thought about what he would do with the creature once it came to life, or any moral or social questions surrounding its existence. He treats the being as a wretched slave, chaining him up and handling him harshly. For the creature, Victor is his entire world, but for Victor, he is merely a botched attempt at playing God, and a reminder of Victor’s inability to take responsibility for his own actions.
12. One of the best differences between the Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the 2025 film is the climactic events in the tale. In the book, Victor dies of exhaustion and illness on the ship, and the creature comes onboard the vessel after he is already dead. But in the film, the creature catches up to Victor while he is still alive and tells him about what happened to him, his journey into the wild, and how he learned to read, write, and understand the complex nature of human society. Moved and remorseful, Victor offers a heartfelt apology to the creature, accepting him as his son, and seeks his forgiveness.
Guillermo del Toro gives Frankenstein’s creature a much deserved closure that is denied to him in Mary Shelley’s book. In the novel, the creature mourns Victor’s death and vows to kill himself, but in the film, Victor tells him to live on, despite the hardships and heartbreak that await him. It’s a fitting, emotional end to the tragic gothic classic.
While there are a few more differences between the original gothic classic and the 2025 film, I am going to wrap the list here.
You can watch Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein on Netflix.
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