Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 adaptation of Frankenstein reimagines Mary Shelley’s classic as a deeply emotional story about creation, consequence, and the long shadow of fathers and sons. The film stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Creature, with Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz in key roles. It premiered at Venice, played a limited run in theaters, and then released globally on Netflix on November 7, 2025.
While it honors the novel’s frame and key set pieces, del Toro is explicit that his aim is not traditional horror. He calls it an emotional story about outsiders and about the wounds that pass from fathers to sons and back again. The Arctic bookends remain, the Creature’s search for connection remains, and the bond and break between maker and made remains the central engine. But the film’s emphasis is empathy, responsibility, and forgiveness rather than simple fear.
Plot in brief: Victor, a brilliant and driven scientist shaped by an oppressive father, becomes obsessed with conquering death. He succeeds, but recoils from the living result. The unnamed Creature, born with a childlike openness and painful self-awareness, is abandoned to learn the world without guidance. Along the way he encounters both kindness and cruelty, including a moving interlude with a blind man who treats him as a person rather than a problem. Tragedies follow. The paths of creator and creation cross again in anger, grief, and a hard search for meaning. Del Toro’s telling steers toward the possibility of reconciliation, while never looking away from the harm of Victor’s choices.
Critics have noted that the film humanizes the Creature and treats the story as a lavish, gothic meditation on responsibility and empathy. Elordi’s performance in particular has been highlighted for carrying the Creature’s dignity and wounded innocence.
The movie works as a mirror for leadership because Victor does not fail on the science. He fails on the leadership. Four patterns stand out.
1.) Victor has an audacious vision: to create life and defy the finality of death. Vision is not the problem. The failure is what he does when the vision becomes real. He recoils in shame and fear, and he abandons his creation. He wants the win without the work of stewardship. In modern terms, this is the founder who ships a powerful system into the world and then treats the human fallout as someone else’s job. Del Toro’s version puts special weight on this point by moving the story out of horror and into an ethical drama about care and consequence. Ambition without ownership breeds harm. If you bring something powerful into the world, you inherit a duty of care for its effects.
2.) Victor relates to the Creature as a result, not as a being. That is what lets him walk away. Del Toro frames this in the language of family: Victor becomes the very kind of father he feared and resented. The Creature is cast as a son who must find his humanity without a parent willing to guide him. This reframing turns a lab failure into a family failure. In organizational life the same error shows up when leaders see staff as inputs and outputs, rather than people whose development they encourage. When people are treated like prototypes, leaders excuse their own neglect as a technical necessity. That neglect then becomes culture.
3.) Victor’s pattern is familiar. He does something he is not sure is right. It works, but it looks wrong. Shame floods in. He hides. Every new harm deepens the story he tells himself: the problem out there is the monster, not the choices in here. Del Toro stresses that this story is personal and biographical for him, which is why the film leans away from jump scares and toward moral clarity. Shame moves leaders from “I made a mistake” to “I am a mistake,” which produces flight, blame, and delay rather than repair.
4.) The familiar late-stage instinct in many adaptations is to destroy the Creature, erase evidence, and end the story by ending the witness. Del Toro’s telling turns the focus toward whether repair and forgiveness are even possible. The Creature’s growth comes not from revenge but from seeing another person, understanding the harm, and choosing a different path. That is a leadership lesson, not a lab note. Control and eradication feel efficient, but they do not heal a system you helped break. Integration and repair are slower and harder, and they are the only path that actually closes the loop.
The film’s failures map neatly to a set of corrective practices leaders can adopt whether they run a company, a team, or a project.
Corrective for vision without responsibility: codify duty of care
- State your duty in writing. Before launch, write a one page “duty of care” that names the people who can be harmed, the kinds of harm that are plausible, and the owner who will respond if harm appears. Publish it internally. Refer to it in reviews.
- Attach budget and calendar to responsibility. Vision that is not funded is not real. Dedicate a clear percentage of the initiative’s resources to monitoring, customer care, and post-launch remediation.
- Run a red team and a premortem. Ask a separate group to break your plan. Do a premortem where the team imagines the project failed and lists the reasons, then adjust the plan. Treat this as a normal part of build, not as a sign of weakness.
- Set a post-launch review window. Thirty, sixty, and ninety days after release, gather data about real world impact. If you are proud to build the thing, be proud to measure its effects.
Corrective for treating people like experiments: design for partnership
- Name people as ends, not means. In goals documents, write people first. Example: “We will grow revenue by building a system that makes customers feel more in control and makes staff feel more competent.”
- Tie manager bonuses to growth of people, not only growth of metrics. Use development goals in performance plans and measure them with real evidence.
- Institutionalize consent and context. Before rolling out a tool or policy that affects daily work, give people context, choices, and a feedback channel. “Here is why we are doing this, here are your options, here is how to raise a concern.”
- Build the blind man moment into your culture. Del Toro’s film features a humane encounter with a blind elder who does not judge by appearances. Create your version: recurring “listen only” sessions where frontline people describe reality while leaders only ask clarifying questions.
Corrective for shame avoidance: normalize accountable repair
- Adopt a 24 hour repair rule. When a leader creates harm, they acknowledge it within one day, even if they do not have a solution yet. “Here is what I did, here is who it affected, here is what I will do next.”
- Separate guilt from identity. Use the language of behavior, not essence. “I made a harmful choice” beats “I am a failure.” This keeps leaders in the arena long enough to fix what they broke.
- Create a public ledger of fixes. Maintain a simple log of issues raised, owners, timelines, and outcomes. Visible surfacing of hard problems becomes part of the culture.
- Train leaders in apology and amends. Role-play specific apology scripts. Make amends tangible: policy changes, restitution, public credit, or time reallocated to solve the harm.
Corrective for erasure instincts: build integration and reconciliation into the process
- Treat whistleblowers and critics as early warning allies. Give them protected channels and set response SLAs. Remember that the Creature’s most accurate critique is often the one you least want to hear.
- Use restorative circles after major breaks. Bring affected parties into a structured conversation: what happened, who was hurt, what repair looks like now, what boundaries are needed going forward.
- Redesign systems, not just people. If you fire a person but leave the incentive structure intact, you just made the next Creature. Fix the process conditions that produced the harm.
- Tell the story of repair. Leaders shape culture by narrating what was wrong and what changed. Del Toro’s emphasis on forgiveness is not sentiment. It is operational design for a future that does not repeat the past.
You do not need a title to practice these habits. Here are simple moves anyone can make, whether you run an agency, manage a small team, or are just trying to be a better partner, parent, or friend.
1. The one page duty of care
Write a small note before you start something that will affect others at work or at home. Answer three questions:
- Who can be helped, and who can be hurt, by this plan?
- What will I watch to see if it is helping or hurting?
- If it starts to hurt, what is my first repair step?
Keep it on your phone. Review it after you act. This turns “good intentions” into a light process of responsibility.
2. The listen first conversation
Before you give advice or push a change, run one listen first conversation.
- Ask for ten minutes.
- Say: “I want to understand how this feels on your side. Can you walk me through your day and where this shows up?”
- Paraphrase what you heard. Do not fix yet.
- Ask: “If we changed one thing this week, what would matter most to you?”
This is the humane encounter that changes how you see the person in front of you. It is the blind man scene translated into daily practice.
3. The 24 hour repair
When you mess up, do not wait for the perfect speech. Within a day, send a short message:
- “I did X. I see it caused Y. I am sorry.”
- “Here is the next action I will take by Friday.”
- “Here is how you can hold me to it.”
Speed matters. So does specificity. You are choosing relationship over image.
4. The integration habit
When something goes wrong, resist the urge to erase. Ask:
- What part of this problem is a person, and what part is a system?
- If I remove the person, what system stays that will recreate the harm?
- What boundary and what change would make a repeat less likely?
Do a small version now. Do a bigger version later with help.
5. The horizon reset
Del Toro’s film keeps returning to a single question: can we widen the future enough to make empathy rational again. You can do this in small ways.
- When you negotiate, add one more round to the horizon. “If we work well, what could our next project look like.”
- When you give feedback, say what you will do in return. “If you deliver this, I will remove that roadblock for you.”
- When you design a policy, add a review date and invite the people it affects to that review.
Reciprocity thrives when the future is real. The movie insists on that. So should you.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein is not an argument against daring. It is an argument that the work of making something new does not end when the lightning hits. The Creature is not a warning about curiosity. He is a warning about leaders who love creation more than care. The film asks us to want both, to pursue excellence and then stand by what we make. That is not only a better story. It is a better way to lead.
