Directed and Written by Guillermo del Toro
Cinematography Dan Laustsen
Rating: ★★★★★

How can forgiveness and hope emerge from brokenness? This production offers one of the most beautiful reflections on that question I’ve encountered.

Few filmmakers could craft a work as visually sumptuous as this. The meticulous sets, the colour harmonies, the lingering shots are all infused with such care. Yet what makes it truly remarkable is that its beauty never distracts. It breathes alongside the story, amplifying its quiet questions about belonging, identity, and the fragile balance between creation and responsibility. Every frame seems to carry the ache of longing: for connection, for understanding, for a sense of home within one’s own form.

It is, in many ways, a meditation on what it means to be an outsider, to exist at the margins of acceptance and still yearn for recognition. Del Toro reframes myth in a way that feels immediate and profoundly human, allowing an ancient narrative to mirror the anxieties and tenderness of our own time. Through this, he invites us to consider how empathy reshapes the way we see and tell stories, how perspective itself becomes a moral force that bridges the distance between maker and creation, self and other.

There is a sense of completion in the film’s rhythm, as though it moves in a perfect circle. It begins with a sunrise and returns to it, as if to remind us that, at some point, it will be okay. The sun will rise again and again. Much of this grace belongs to the cinematography, where every ray, every shadow, every colour hums with hope.

What lingers most is the quiet reminder that our flaws and fragments do not diminish us but reveal our capacity to care, to imagine, to forgive. In this sense, Del Toro’s Frankenstein feels less like a story about monsters and more like an act of healing. It is a tender affirmation that creation, in all its imperfection, is an expression of love.

Image courtesy of Netflix