Let’s talk about the casting drama. When Jacob Elordi (yes, that Jacob Elordi) was announced as the replacement for Andrew Garfield, the collective groan from film Twitter was audible. How could the guy from Euphoria possibly embody cinema’s most iconic monster? Well, consider every doubt silenced. Buried under ten hours of breathtaking practical makeup, Elordi delivers a performance that is less about grunts and bolts and more about a soul-crushing, childlike agony. This isn’t your grandfather’s monster; this is a six-foot-five, deeply sentient tragedy, and he is the bleeding heart of Guillermo del Toro’s gothic, gorgeous, and achingly human adaptation.Del Toro, as expected, has crafted a world that feels less like a movie and more like a fever dream painted on velvet. Every frame is a gothic masterpiece, dripping with rain, candlelight, and melancholy. He leans fully into his signature theme: the monster as a misunderstood saint, the civilized humans as the true grotesques. But here, that empathy becomes both the film’s greatest strength and its most frustrating flaw.The film radically reimagines its Creature as an almost pure symbol of compassion, a being who (unlike in the novel) only commits violence by accident or in self-defense. This choice gives Elordi’s performance a heartbreaking innocence, but it robs the story of its most dangerous tension. We’re never allowed to fear him, never forced to question our own allegiance. Del Toro hands us the film’s moral on a silver platter Victor is the bad guy, obviously when the story’s true power has always been in forcing us to find that answer in the dark ourselves.Opposite this gentle giant is Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein, and he is anything but subtle. This isn’t a measured scientist; he’s a Full Ham explosion of Byronic ego, ambition, and daddy issues (thanks to a terrifying Charles Dance). Isaac plays Victor as a man so broken by his own abusive past that he can only repeat the cycle, abusing his own son with a cruelty that is genuinely hard to watch. The dynamic between Isaac’s manic, toxic father and Elordi’s wounded, searching child reframes the entire narrative. It’s not about science vs. God; it’s about the profound, devastating trauma of abandonment.Del Toro’s Frankenstein may not be the definitive version, and it certainly isn’t the scariest. It’s a bloated, beautiful, and emotionally messy sermon on loneliness. But in a world obsessed with binaries and quick to cast out the other, this cinematic plea for radical empathy feels vital. You’ll walk in expecting a monster, and walk out wondering if you just saw the most human character of the year.