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Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the year’s most talked-about movies continues with the Venice Film Festival-premiering Frankenstein, Netflix’s epic drama and long-awaited passion project from writer-director Guillermo del Toro. Oscar Isaac stars Victor Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi as The Creature, and Mia Goth as Elizabeth.
Since its strong reception in Venice, Frankenstein has been racking up nominations and wins early in the awards season, with 11 nominations and four wins at the Critics Choice Awards, five Golden Globe noms including for Best Picture and Director, a SAG-AFTRA’s Actor Awards nom for the ensemble cast, and numerous noms piling up from the crafts guilds; it has a total of 11 mentions among the craft categories included in the Oscar shortlists. Elordi scored a win at Critics Choice, also has an Actor Award nom, while he and Isaac are both up for Globes.
Del Toro, meanwhile, scored a nomination from the USC Scripter Awards which honors the writers of adapted scripts and the original works on which they are based. He also picked up a DGA Awards nom earlier today.
After decades in development, del Toro’s Frankenstein realizes the filmmaker’s childhood dream of adapting Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic masterpiece. The film stands apart from the countless previous versions by undertaking a significant narrative inversion: it shifts the central focus from Victor Frankenstein to his creation. Del Toro re-characterizes “The Monster” as “The Creature,” dedicating the film to his perspective and experience as well.
The film follows Victor, a brilliant yet ego-driven scientist, who attempts to defy death by creating a new form of life. The monstrous experiment ultimately results in the undoing of both the creator and his tragic, nameless creation. The sprawling narrative transports audiences from the remote, icy reaches of the Arctic to the bloody battlefields of 19th century Europe as both Frankenstein and The Creature embark on their separate, desperate searches for meaning.
Victor is a complex figure whom del Toro describes as a tyrant who views himself as a victim, destroying the lives of others while bemoaning his fate. Isaac and del Toro conceived of Victor less as a conventional scientist and more as a “misunderstood artist” with a “punk rock energy,” imagining his laboratory as a stage for provocation. At the story’s outset, the narrative finds him in a “monstrous” and compromised state, barely clinging to life on the North Pole tundra. Victor’s ultimate motivation is his “ego-driven quest to bring new life into this world,” making his journey a descent from uncompromising visionary to a broken, defeated genius.
The audience is introduced to The Creature as a terrifying monstrosity at this moment, after which he then recounts in his own version of his creation. Technically, it makes them both protagonists of the film.
At its core, the film is a deeply humanistic and existential drama exploring profound and universal themes. Del Toro’s version revisits the tale to explore what it truly means to be human, to crave love, and to be profoundly misunderstood as a creator, a creature, a father and a son. The film explores how trauma is inherited and questions the nature of good and evil. While not a conventional horror movie, the director calls it a melodrama where every character possesses a fundamental “failing and a lack,” emphasizing that the film’s central truth is the universal need for love.
Read the screenplay below.
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