Don’t try to play God

Directors can sometimes require their cast to go to interesting lengths. In certain cases, that’s meant giving them a reading list. When making 1999’s sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix, the filmmaking sibling duo the Wachowskis tasked two of their leads, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, with reading up on the books and ideas that inspired the film before they could look at the script. This included French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, an abstract exploration of the relationship between cultural constructs and what is truly real.

For his 2025 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you would expect then that writer and director Guillermo del Toro would send his actors to the 1818 gothic horror classic that inspired it. But according to an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, he curiously assigned them the Tao Te Ching and the book of Job. For del Toro, the Tao contains the truth that “all pain comes from desire,” whereas Job offers the simple lesson that in all things “it is what it is.” As del Toro puts it, in Job “man questions God, why do bad things happen to good people? And the answer, basically, of God is, why not?”

Del Toro, who is well known in Hollywood for his intense interest in the supernatural and who often makes mention of his deeply Catholic upbringing’s influence upon his imagination, clearly has no allergy to religious themes when it comes to his movies. His interpretation of the book of Job, though, is more reflective of a modern stoical nihilism than Frankenstein itself.

In Shelley’s original telling, Victor Frankenstein, the main protagonist, is propelled as a scientist by an interest in “the structure of the human frame” and more than anything else, “the principle of life” that animates both man and beast. As Frankenstein reveals, “It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn.” These labors culminate in the monstrous laboratory birth of the “creature,” refashioned from dead flesh who, once possessed by the “spark of being,” exists as “a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.” A misguided attempt to take the Creator’s place had become an undoing of the created order.

This confusion of our place in the universe is precisely what the book of Job seeks to depict. God is allowing suffering in Job’s life for Job’s greater good and God’s own greater glory by reminding Job that the greatest thing one can have is God Himself. As Job responds to the Lord, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5). He no longer needed to cry out in frustration, for rather than giving a decisive answer, God did something better: He gave Job Himself.

The rest of Victor’s tale is one of tragedy and heartbreak wrought by the flawed being he has fashioned by unholy means. In trying to take God’s place on the basis of his own limited understanding, Frankenstein witnesses a macabre reenactment of the fall, with bloodshed quickly following in the wake of the first breath of life. The creature, who Frankenstein decides against creating a partner for, tells him that “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel,” bringing pain to his earthly maker when he is robbed of what those deemed worthy of humanity freely enjoy every day. After Frankenstein’s death, the creature declares that “Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. … Polluted by crimes and torn by bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?” One will be hard pressed to find a more apt summation of an existence bereft of transcendent meaning.

Good fiction accurately captures the broken reality of the human experience in order to in some small way point us towards either its need for redemption or the redemption itself. Frankenstein presents the plight of man when left to his own devices, whereas the divinely inspired book of Job offers the ultimate satisfaction for our souls in communion with God—even when life around us barely seems to make any sense—since He has graciously not abandoned us.

Del Toro is to be applauded for not shying away from the spiritual crises that Frankenstein presents in sharp, gothic relief. Ideally, his new take on the classic might just be the cause for bringing some closer to discovering what truly lies at the center of the whirlwind that they would flee from otherwise.