Frankenstein has recently been adapted for Netflix by Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro. Approaching the film from a feminist perspective, this review examines how creation without responsibility produces suffering, exposing parallels between the Creature’s abandonment and women’s historical exclusion from autonomy.
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By Srabony Alam Biswas
Netflix’s recent adaptation of Frankenstein revisits Mary Shelley’s novel with visual ambition and narrative restraint, offering a version that is less concerned with sensational horror than with the quiet, unsettling consequences of creation without responsibility. While the film does not explicitly position itself within feminist discourse, its treatment of power, abandonment, and human worth invites such a reading, particularly when viewed through the enduring agitation Shelley herself placed at the center of her narrative.
The adaptation opens with a scene in which Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) begins to mention his ambition to create a living being, a pursuit that attracts the patronage of HeinrichHarlander, who initially approaches Victor regarding the marriage of his niece Elizabeth to Victor’s younger brother, William Frankenstein. Motivated by his own fear of death, Harlander funds Victor’s experiment in the hope of preserving his life through the perfect body Victor seeks to create. Although Victor succeeds in animating the Creature, he recoils from his creation, confines him, and attempts to destroy him. The Creature escapes and is forced to isolation. Throughout the film, Elizabeth shows sustained empathy towards the Creature, subtly underscoring shared experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness.
Abandonment after Creation
At the heart of the film lies Frankenstein’s act of creation, one motivated by intellectual ambition rather than ethical obligation. His pursuit is driven by a desire to »conquer« death, framed less as compassion or necessity than as an assertion of intellectual superiority over his father. The moment of the animation of the Creature initially was celebrated as triumphant, before this sense of achievement quickly gives way to repulsion. Although the Creature first appears as a visibly constructed body of stitched flesh, his hesitant movements and disoriented gazes foreground exposure and dependence rather than monstrosity. Victor’s retreat from his creation signals an ethical withdrawal that comes to shape the remainder of the film. Abandonment here is not merely an emotional failure; it becomes a structural condition. The Creature is left without guidance, name, or place, forced to encounter a world that responds to his existence with fear and violence.
Confinement in Disguise of Safety
Significantly, the first hostility he encounters comes from his own creator. Victor restrains and chains the Creature under the pretext of »safety«, a gesture that frames confinement as protection. This moment invites an unsettling analogy to a form of paternalistic control historically imposed on women, particularly those justified as safeguarding honour or respect, where restriction is glorified as care. The violence escalates when Victor attempts to destroy the Creature after realizing that his creation exceeds his control, most visibly when he bends an iron rod out of wrath, The film’s depiction of freedom further complicates this question. Although the Creature moves through expansive landscapes, these spaces never offer refuge. Mobility functions as exile rather than liberation, reinforcing the paradox of theoretical freedom constrained by social hostility. The repeated imagery of concealment like hiding, retreating, observing from the margins renders visibility itself a form of danger. In this sense, the Creature’s condition reflects a broader logic in which freedom exists only conditionally, granted so long as one remains unseen, silent, or compliant.
Following the Creature’s escape from confinement, this pattern repeats on a broader scale when he is repeatedly shot by others whenever he is seen, not because of any demonstrable danger, but because his body resists familiar categorization.
Objectification of a Living Creature
Victor’s subsequent insistence on referring to the Creature as »it« further reinforces this logic, reducing a sentient being to an object and stripping him of subjecthood in much the same way women are frequently objectified within patriarchal discourse. This pain of being objectified becomes clear when Victor states that he has created »something horrible«, and the Creature responds, »Not something. Someone. You made someone.« The film thus repeatedly emphasizes that the Creature’s suffering is not inherent but produced and manufactured by a system that brings life into being while refusing care, recognition and respect.
Within this framework Elizabeth acquires particular significance. Unlike Shelley’s novel, where Elizabeth is positioned as Victor’s fiancée, the film reassigns her as the fiancée of William, a narrative alteration subtly shifting her role from emotional center to transferable figure within a patriarchal structure. This change becomes especially noticeable through the actions of Harlander. As he faces the fear of death, his desperation exposes the logic underlying his authority through the dialogue »Name it, it’s yours. Even Elizabeth«. He offers Victor wealth, resources, and ultimately Elizabeth herself in exchange for survival, proposing her as leverage to persuade Victor to implant his soul into the Creature’s body.
What is striking in this exchange is not only its moral discomfort, but its casualness. Elizabeth’s consent is neither requested nor imagined. She is treated as a negotiable asset, an object of exchange rather than a subject with agency. This moment, when read alongside Victor’s abandonment of the Creature, reveals a shared structure of male domination. Both the Creature and Elizabeth are positioned as means rather than ends. They are valued only as long as they serve male ambition, longevity, or control.
Denial of Recognition and Autonomy
This dynamic resonates beyond the gothic narrative, particularly when read in relation to historical patterns of authority that define, produce, and regulate life without granting autonomy. The Creature’s namelessness is central to this condition. He is spoken about, classified, and feared, yet never addressed as a subject by either his creator or the society that denies him legitimacy. His identity is consistently relational. This form of denied recognition mirrors feminist analyses of women’s historical exclusion from autonomous subjecthood. Like the Creature, women often have been socially legible primarily through relational identities — daughter, wife, mother — rather than as self-defining individuals. The persistence of patriarchal naming conventions, in which women adopt paternal or marital surnames while maternal lineage remains unacknowledged, further reinforces this structural dependency. Identity thus emerges not as an inherent possession but as a status conferred within systems that privilege masculine continuity.
Frankenstein (2025)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Although the film does not overtly connect Elizabeth’s experience with the Creature’s suffering, the parallel emerges through absence; absence of freedom, absence of voice, absence of choice. The Creature articulates his anguish through isolation and rage when Elizabeth does so through silence and restraint. Both, however, exist within systems that deny them autonomy while asserting authority over their bodies and futures.
The film ultimately suggests, perhaps not intentionally, that monstrosity is not located in the created being, but in the refusal to acknowledge responsibility for creation itself. It is within this tension that Shelley’s novel continues to resonate, and where contemporary adaptations reveal the persistence of her central questions: how responsibility is evaded after creation, how power is exercised over bodies framed as requiring protection and guidance while being denied self-determination.
