For those of us who grew up loving Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” Guillermo del Toro’s new version does not disappoint. The story of a boy who faces death and contempt from a very young age and grows into a man determined to win the battle against death works as a metaphor for many parts of a life.

Oscar Isaac plays the lost son who becomes an insensitive father, just as his own father had been. He keeps seeking affection in audiences and love in rejection. In the process, he creates a “monster” who contains all of his collected parts and still surpasses him in humanity.

Jacob Elordi gives a performance built on physical presence, sweetness, and an almost painful capacity for love.

The film’s artistic decisions and Del Toro’s vision turn that familiar story into something that feels like a new work.

The film belongs to a long line of adaptations, but the reason this one travels so far is that it feels, unapologetically, like a Latino movie at its core.

How “Frankenstein” became Netflix’s latest obsession

“Frankenstein” arrives with a long shadow behind it. Del Toro publicly called this his “dream project” for more than a decade and kept returning to Shelley’s novel as a kind of private scripture.

According to coverage of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the film earned a lengthy standing ovation and early reviews that described it as a lavish, emotional epic rather than a conventional horror piece. Critics have situated it in the lineage of Gothic romanticism. They mention Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Neil Jordan’s “Interview with the Vampire,” and Del Toro’s own “Crimson Peak” as reference points.

Netflix released the movie in select theaters on October 17, then globally on the platform on November 7. Within days, it climbed to the top of the service’s Global Top 10 for English-language films. Trade sites that track Netflix numbers report more than 29 million views in its first days alone, which places it among the platform’s most-watched titles of the year and already pushes it toward the company’s all-time leader board.

Yet the numbers tell only part of the story. The other part lives in the way viewers, especially Latino viewers, describe the film. They talk about a very specific sense of recognition: The Catholic guilt, the tyrant father, the golden child, the darker son who hears, silently, that he does not quite belong. That atmosphere does not happen by accident.

And the film’s success reflects that recognition in measurable ways.

According to Nielsen’s 2025 Diverse Intelligence Series report, Latino viewers drive 55.8 percent of their total TV time through streaming, surpassing the 46 percent for the rest of the country. They also outpace the general U.S. population in their viewership of platforms like Netflix, YouTube, and Disney.

The report describes U.S. Latinos as a demographic that represents nearly 20 percent of the population and has more than $4 trillion in purchasing power. It states that their digital and mobile habits shape broader entertainment trends and that they “are not waiting to be represented” because they are already curating their own media ecosystems.

When a film like “Frankenstein” arrives with a sensibility that understands the community at its core, it lands inside an audience that lives with those dynamics every day. In that sense, Latino viewers do not sit at the periphery of the film’s success. They sit at the center of it.

A European myth told through a Latino heart

Oscar Isaac has a line that functions as a thesis statement. Speaking about the film, he said it is “this very European story, but told through a very Latin American, Mexican, Catholic point of view. So, it was just high passion all the time.”

Shelley’s novel travels from Geneva to the Arctic. The book speaks in the language of the Romantic period and the early Industrial Age. Del Toro keeps the nineteenth-century setting and the frozen ship. He keeps the aristocratic science and the philosophical questions about life and death. Yet he filters all of it through what he calls “our Latinness.”

In the conversation with Isaac, he says, “I think that one of the things we connected over that dinner was our Latinness. Because obviously the shadow of the father looms differently in the Latino family, I believe.”

The phrase has weight; it moves “Frankenstein” away from a neutral European fable and toward something rooted in Latin American family structures, where patriarchy feels both personal and structural.

Later, del Toro pushes the point further: “When people say, ‘What’s Mexican about your movies?’ I say, ‘me.’ What else do you want? I mean, I think you cannot deny what you are, who you are. And what moves you and what moves you in any act of artistic expression ever.”

The film carries that answer in every frame.

“Frankenstein” as a Latino family drama in disguise

Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” rearranges Shelley’s material around one central line of pain: a father who chooses one son and rejects the other. Del Toro articulates the choice in terms that feel very specific to Latin America and to its long history with color, class, and colonial hierarchy.

He describes Victor’s world like this: “The sort of pageantry […] of Catholicism, which borders on the operatic. The intensity of the emotions and the fact that Victor is different from his father. His mother and he have darker skin, black eyes, black hair, dark complexion… and the father never accepts him. For the Mexican director, it is the “melodrama of being blind to those flaws.”

In his version, Victor is the darker son. He becomes the hurt child who inherits power and refuses to see that he has become the father he feared. For his part, Isaac relates that dynamic to his own life. He talks about feeling like an outsider “from the moment that we came from Guatemala… always feeling like a bit of an other,” and then entering an industry that kept casting him as the gangster, the limited idea of a Latino man.

That shared experience of exclusion and overcompensation explains why Victor feels familiar to viewers who grew up in Latin American households or Latino households in the United States. The boy who hears that he is “too much.” The man who decides that excellence will save him, even if he has to burn the world down to prove it.

Catholic imagery, melodrama, and the creature as messiah

When del Toro talks about “Frankenstein,” he does not sound like a director talking about a monster movie. He sounds like someone wrestling with theology.

“There were three things that were important in this film to tackle. And one is the Catholic fact that God and Jesus, our father and son, the primordial story, where God sends his son to experience pain and death. Why? What does it do, and the creature becomes a sort of messiah to expiate the sins of his father. And getting forgiveness and all that. That was number one. The Catholic element of this film is very, very strong.”

The creature does not simply haunt Victor. He stands in for every discarded child and every sacrifice that a patriarchal system normalizes. In del Toro’s reading, the creature carries the pain of Mary Shelley’s miscarriages and the deaths in her family. He says, “That’s the creature. The creature is every child she has lost.”

On set, del Toro even asks Isaac for a specific kind of movement straight out of Latin American soap operas. “I need the Maria Cristina, the tele novella turn.”

He layers high melodrama over high theology. And in traditional visual tradition, it should not work. But here it does. It feels like home to anyone raised in spaces where the Virgin Mary stands next to a flat-screen television and everyone cries in the kitchen at least once a week.

Why “Frankenstein” feels personal, not prestige

Del Toro quotes an old maxim when discussing the film. “People say all art is self-portraiture, right? But it’s so for everyone involved. Mia is Elizabeth, and Jacob is the creature in many ways. Not the Jacob people perceive, but the Jacob that he perceives himself as, and it’s very beautiful. You don’t look for anything outside.”

In practice, this means “Frankenstein” never feels like a museum piece. It does not behave like a prestige adaptation where everything looks expensive and spiritually inert. Del Toro rejects that approach outright. He compares it to taxidermy. “Like the difference between a taxidermy piece that you do with reverence because you really give it life through yourself.”

That insistence on life over reverence is what people respond to when they stream it at midnight, alone, with the brightness turned down.

“Frankenstein” and the hope of forgiving each other for existing

Shelley’s novel ends in ice and doom. Del Toro respects that original despair. He also feels compelled to answer the world he lives in now.

He describes the difference in clear terms: “The book was responding to many things, including doom. Doom was such a worthy thing to tackle in an era of reason and the beginnings of industrialization. The beginnings of modernity. And they said, ‘What if we lose? What if we all lose?’ That was a very romantic notion. Now, for me, the urgent message is what if we could all forgive each other for existing? What if we could all be flawed?”

The ending of “Frankenstein” still hurts. Victor still dies. The creature still walks alone. Yet the final moments lean toward a small, radical mercy. A son forgives a father who did not deserve it. A creature who has every reason to burn the world chooses to help a ship full of strangers turn around.

Del Toro frames that choice as necessary. He speaks about the present in his work on “Pinocchio” and returns to the theme here: Fascism. Obedience. Disobedience. The cost of dehumanizing the other. He says he cannot articulate what Mary Shelley articulated in the nineteenth century. He has to articulate what feels urgent now.

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