Why 'Frankenstein' is a movie about fathers, sons and 'forgiveness'

• Oscar Isaac plays scientist Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi is his Creature in "Frankenstein."
• The horror film is streaming Friday, Nov. 7, on Netflix.
• Guillermo del Toro's movie is adapted from Mary Shelley's 1818 gothic novel "Frankenstein."

When Guillermo del Toro was casting his Victor Frankenstein for a new take on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” he met with Oscar Isaac for a Cuban dinner and saw enough vulnerability and a little madness to know Isaac was right for the iconic role.

“That was the pork,” Isaac deadpans.

“Yeah. But when the beans arrived, I saw passion!” del Toro says, laughing.

Good food was on the menu that night but so was a deep conversation about fathers and sons, a major theme of “Frankenstein” (streaming Nov. 7 on Netflix) and many of the filmmaker’s works.

In the new film, a young Victor (Christian Convery) is raised by a cruel, domineering dad (Charles Dance) but loves his mother (Mia Goth). Losing her when he’s a child inspires adult scientist Victor (Isaac) to find a way to conquer death by creating life.

The result is the Creature (Jacob Elordi), who's chained up in Victor's basement and is comforted by Elizabeth Harlander (also Goth), Victor's crush and his brother’s fiancée. When she begins to pay a lot of attention to Victor’s “offspring” and the Creature isn’t as human as Victor wants, the father lashes out violently at the son. It continues a cycle of trauma and leads ultimately to an important chat between the two.

Del Toro had been wanting to make “Frankenstein” since he saw the original 1931 horror classic with Boris Karloff when the Oscar-winning director was 7. But as with his recent take on “Pinocchio,” del Toro thought a lot about his own father, Federico: The elder del Toro, a Mexican automobile entrepreneur, was kidnapped for 72 days in 1998 and the family paid a $1 million ransom.

After this time of "enormous pain," the younger del Toro and his family left his home country for Los Angeles for safety reasons, a move he's referred to as an “involuntary exile.” His father died in 2018, five months after Guillermo del Toro won a best directing Oscar for “The Shape of Water.”

“To be disarmingly truthful, I went through not understanding my father, thinking I was going to be different, to finding him in the mirror at age 42, to doing exactly the things he did, and not forgiving myself for that, asking for forgiveness for that, and eventually thinking now that I would give anything for him to be alive right now,” del Toro, 61, explains.

He wishes he could have “a really serious talk” with his father to say, “I know who you are ... and I understand everything you did,” del Toro says. “It happened during the movie, and it happens every day now. I think that acceptance is the highest form of wisdom in a way and forgiveness.”

“Frankenstein” also inspired Elordi, 28, to have a deep and honest conversation with his own father, John, a house painter who immigrated to Australia from the Basque Country. “It makes me want to have it now and to not have to look back and wish that I could have that talk because I have my dad and I adore my dad,” he says.

And for Isaac, 46, the movie put his own fatherhood into perspective.

“Yeah, I try not to chain them that often in the basement anymore,” Isaac jokes. He has two sons, Eugene, 8, and Mads, 6, with his wife, Danish director Elvira Lind.

He appreciates “the idea of children not just being an extension of my ego." What’s also important for him as a dad is “forgiveness for the past and for maybe things that I've held on to from my childhood that cause me to act in a way that I've been blind to, and to be able to become aware of it and to let it go.”