Frankenstein is more than just a Gothic cautionary tale. Rich with complex, knotty themes, it's no wonder the story has retained its relevance in popular culture over 200 years after the novel was first published.
While Mary Shelley's book is concerned with asking philosophical questions about ethics and morality, however, Guillermo del Toro's new adaptation is often more interested in looking closer to home. Instead of examining the myth of Prometheus, for example, the film interrogates more intimate issues like generational trauma, difficult familial relationships, and shame.
"It definitely highlights the personal over the scientific," says Jacob Elordi, who plays the Creature, who's brought to life as a result of Victor Frankenstein's experiments. "To me, it's a biography of Guillermo's."
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"He asked us to bring our own biography in that way as well," Oscar Isaac, who plays Victor, adds. "That's how he and I first connected over the story, was talking about our families and our fathers and how that figure looms so large. And so that's really what he was focused on."
As well as the strained relationship between Victor and the Creature as the scientist becomes an unwilling father figure, we also get an insight into Victor's own difficult dynamic with his own cold and distant father (played by Charles Dance) through a series of flashbacks early in the film.
But the novel's grander themes are present in the movie, too, "particularly through Elizabeth, Mia Goth's character, when she talks about what happens when great ideas are pursued by fools," Isaac acknowledges, "and what happens when someone, for whatever reasons, becomes so focused on achieving a goal that they feel that they deserve to behave however they need to behave in order to achieve that goal."
Frankenstein debuts on Netflix on November 7. For more on what to stream, check out our guide to the best movies on Netflix and everything else that's new on Netflix in November 2025.
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