mercy

Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro’s new film Frankenstein brings Shelley’s old questions back into sharp focus. Watching it, I wasn’t thinking about the film alone but about the world we now inhabit: a world driven by machines that imitate judgement, technologies released faster than any ethics can catch them, and creators who often step back from the consequences of what they build. The story became a frame for thinking about invention without care and the human cost of systems that move ahead of responsibility.

From the first shot, it was clear del Toro wasn’t interested in telling a simple horror story. He was asking what happens when creation slips away from responsibility. His protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a man capable of making life but unwilling to face what follows. His Creature is marked by a worn, unmistakably human presence, punished simply for existing. Together they pull Shelley’s story into the present, where knowledge outruns empathy and creators disown the harm their inventions cause. This isn’t a film review. It’s a way of thinking about an age built on AI, automated judgement and systems that move faster than the societies they reshape.

The Image as Argument

Del Toro’s visuals feel like political claims. Inside the lab, everything shines with promise, but the world around it already feels smaller, narrowed by Victor’s drive. Step outside, and the landscape is hard and unwelcoming. The images hint at a future where speed counts for more than judgement, and the tools we build quietly take choices away from the people who have to live with them.

The Creature and the Human Left Behind

The Creature’s journey exposes what gets left behind when systems evolve without accountability. His struggle is not mythic fortitude. It is the fight of someone denied belonging, yet still reaching for it. His suffering comes not from nature but neglect. That is where the story finds its political edge. When institutions, technologies or creators step back, people fall through the cracks. Monsters are produced through abandonment long before they ever lash out.

The Wound of Inheritance

Endurance teaches survival, but survival alone cannot heal neglect. To understand where that wound begins, we have to turn from myth to the people who make it. Like Shelley, the director builds his story on failed fathers: men who mistake intellect for affection and principle for presence.

In Shelley’s novel, Victor’s father is distant, a man of education and propriety who believes guidance is best delivered through correction rather than warmth. When Victor loses his mother, his father’s stoic restraint becomes a model of civility that hides a failure of empathy. That early absence of emotional attention shapes Victor’s later obsession with mastering life instead of understanding it. Shelley knew this pattern intimately.

Her father, William Godwin, preached liberty and reason but struggled with tenderness. He married Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist intellectual, only after her death, a gesture that exposed how intellect can perform care without ever practising it. Shelley grew up inside that contradiction: a father who believed in just progress yet withheld warmth. Frankenstein became her answer to that hypocrisy. Victor Frankenstein is Godwin’s idea of pure reason turned human. He creates life but cannot care for what he has made. His emotional detachment does not just inform his choices; it defines his mythic role.Victor became the modern Prometheus. By the end, he finally confesses what drives him: pride, greed, and the hunger to control. It is the only peace he earns, and it feels like the confession of our own age.

Del Toro recognises the same model and turns it outward. His Victor belongs to our century of technocrats who build systems and then deny their consequences. He is our era’s new aristocracy of tech feudalism: ambitious, efficient, and unaccountable. The technology elite speak of optimisation, disruption, long-term futures and existential threats, but rarely of the ordinary lives reshaped by their decisions. Some imagine themselves visionaries, others saviours, others guardians of civilisation. But Shelley’s question cuts through that confidence. What does it mean to create something powerful, then step aside when it begins to rearrange the world?

Systems Without Stewards

The logic of the story echoes the world we now occupy. Tools built to support us now automate decisions about welfare, policing and work. Machine learning reshapes social life faster than regulators can understand it. Data systems expand with no clear stewards. What Shelley framed as a private tragedy now feels structural. Victor’s refusal to care has become a model reproduced across industries.

And this is where the parallel lands. We’ve slipped into a century shaped by people who build vast systems yet refuse to own the worlds those systems produce. Think of Elon Musk’s faith in acceleration, or Peter Thiel and Alex Karp insisting that Palantir’s surveillance tools are essential for democracy. Each stance mirrors Victor’s belief that intellect alone justifies power. They cast themselves as guardians of progress, yet their creations are already remaking social life faster than any public can respond. Frankenstein unsettles because it shows what follows when men commanding immense influence refuse to look directly at the people caught beneath their ambitions.

That is why the Frankenstein story matters again. It does not tell us how to regulate AI. It reminds us that danger begins when makers decide they are above the consequences of their work. Shelley wrote a warning. Del Toro simply holds up the mirror. The question is no longer whether Victor failed. It is whether we, facing our own age of unsupervised power, will choose to do any better.