The following essay contains spoilers of Frankenstein (2025).

Guillermo del Toro, maestro of macabre, has made so many creature features hinging on the same theme: What if, get this, the monster is man? 

But his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein hits differently than the rest of his fare. His gothic epic captures something many other Frankenstein iterations failed to do adequately by exploring the queer virtue of belonging.

Many other scholars have pointed out that Shelley’s tale bears a queer subtext, which is only furthered by her (famously rumored) bisexual identity. The monster who simply doesn’t belong anywhere but wants to be seen and to exist can be mapped onto to many LGBTQ experiences of many spectrums.

GDT’s iteration is very father-son heavy, almost continuing his daddy issues threads from Pinocchio. But in lieu of the creature’s navigation of experiencing existence for the first time, it inadvertently captures a they/he perspective. As someone whose pronouns are exactly those, I found it to be an empathetic navigation of the differences between masculinity and humanity.

The film’s two-part framing device consists of Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and his creature (Jacob Elordi) narrating their respective stories to Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) like a testimony dissecting who the true monster is.

Within Victor’s rather overlong, albeit entertaining, portion, we learn he’s the inheritor of generational trauma. His neglect and abuse from his wealthy scientist father (Charles Dance) and his deep grief from his mother’s passing drove him to defy his father by pursuing reanimation from death. Yet through masculine-driven ego, despite brilliance, he creates his immortalized creature.

As the creature comes to life, he functions like a newborn baby, wanting to be loved and nurtured. Elordi and Isaac share an unmatched moment when the creature utters Victor’s name as his first word, Victor beaming with unfathomable parental pride, the creature smiling. It boils down to the most timeless human delight of a parent hearing their child say their first word. Nevertheless, Victor’s joy is immediately replaced with a deep-seated resentment as he is ashamed of the creature’s sluggish development. He resorts to abusing the creature by chaining him to the base of the tower in which he was created, restraining him from the world itself.

My experience growing up with my late father wasn’t anything comparable to the creature’s early life. My father was the parent I felt most comfortable being my feminine side around, and he championed all of my successes. He was the parent I came out to first. That same day, I caught him watching Monster-in-Law, which he deemed “a classic,” and I knew where my feminine side came from.

My dad raising me with kindness and his embrace of all of me is something I don’t take for granted. Frankenstein (2025) helped me see the alternative and made me think about other queer kids whose parents more closely resemble Victor. There’s such a stigmatization among Black parents and other parents of marginalized communities when it comes to having a queer kid. The creature’s unaccepted otherness for not being immediately as sophisticated or beautiful as his parent expects him to be is both heartbreaking and accurate to the resilience of the lonely child.

I must praise Elordi’s remarkable performance, as he carries a gentleness and imbues a wide-eyed discovery in everything he interacts with, not bogged down by the world’s cynicism. While gargantuan in sight, Elordi’s portrayal combines the energies and physicalities of both reanimated man and, lacking a better word, babygirl.

Indeed, much of Frankenstein‘s exploration of a grown-man-coming-into-own-humanity reminds me of one of my non-binary foreshadowing childhood pillar movies: Tarzan. This is seen particularly through the monster’s relationship with Lady Elizabeth (Mia Goth), Victor’s younger brother William’s (Felix Kammerer) fiancée, who Victor is down bad for. Elizabeth detests Victor, which is furthered once she finds the monster imprisoned. The kindness the monster yearns for is given by Elizabeth. Goth channels a mixture of startlement, fascination, and adoration, like Jane’s first encounter with Tarzan. Their first encounter also involves comparing their hand sizes, illustrating their human nature and kind-hearted identities. It’s with her we see him being such a loving person, just wanting to be kind.

In the “creature’s side of the story,” the creature’s kindhearted innocence is furthered as he transforms into “the spirit of the forest,” defending a hunting family on a farm from wolves unseen by them. Once they leave, he forms a friendship with an elderly blind man (David Bradley). There, he learns to read, write, and speak fluently. He  also learns to comprehend the harshness of nature, where violence is more of a survival trait than sheer hatred. Bradley and Elordi have a beautiful scene where he describes how the one man he killed haunts him to this day, touching on the remorse of man’s ignorance and the haunting of patriarchal violence.

It’s through his gentle, sweet-natured bonds with Elizabeth and the Old Man that we see the creature’s plight of wanting to be seen as a human free of binary constraints in the world dictated by masculinity. While not given the proper tools to experience the world and only knowing suffering and estrangement from his literal father, he retains deep-rooted love and fascination. Inadvertently, del Toro captures the most compelling dissertation on being a non-binary and/or queer person who desires to feel and love in the world. Elizabeth describes him as “a heart purer than that of the common man.”

When the blind man and eventually Elizabeth die at the hands of violent beings — wolves and Victor in a fit of jealousy — we see how the creature’s rage stems from a deep-rooted response to being stripped of love and kindness. “If you forbid me love, then I am to indulge in rage,” the creature intimidatingly says to his maker.

Rage is a universal response frequently associated with masculinity. When someone is othered, they end up falsely portrayed by privileged individuals like Victor as more monstrous, more threatening. In our daily lives, we see this play out in right-wing media, which paints queer, trans, and otherwise marginalized people as angry and violent all the time. But the reality is also that the ways queer and trans people are denied love and care by straight society do instill understandable rage. Neglect begets brutality. It’s why so many queer folks find kinship in the monsters of creature features, especially one like Frankenstein, which directly draws a line between parental abuse and monster-making. Witnessing the creature in Frankenstein torment his father is, frankly, cathartic.

In his last moments, Victor apologizes and begs for forgiveness after hearing the creature’s account of his ordeal, survival, and suffering. Recognizing his generational cycle of trauma, he asks him to break it by simply saying his name like he once did when he was born, when it, for the first time in his life, had meaning. The origin of the love between a parent and child as it briefly once was reinanimated by Victor’s gentle caress on his creature’s face and the creature’s silent tear. The acceptance of a parent finally understanding and loving all of him traces back to just about every child’s yearning for nurturing. Through his father’s final request to live, the creature is ultimately granted the renowned hope, a goal that we, as queer individuals of diverse identities, strive to achieve in an unjust world.

GDT’s Frankenstein gracefully honors Shelley’s work by beautifully illustrating the queer pursuit of existing in the world and seeking love and acceptance for their full selves. The film’s complex portrayal of its “creature” demonstrates what it means to live freely and unbound by binary expectations. Frankenstein examines the repercussions of parents who fail to liberate themselves from the generational cycle of abuse and how their sins can affect their youth, who just want to be loved and supported no matter who they are and how they choose to experience the world. If those impulses and love aren’t a virtue of the human condition, what is?

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