The Tragic Death of Victor Frankenstein’s Mother, Explained

Echoing Mary Shelley’s classic, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein rewinds the myth to Victor’s haunted childhood, long before the monster draws breath. On the shadowed Frankenstein estate, Christian Convery’s young Victor is torn between a gentle mother, Claire, and a starkly different father, as a shattering tragedy sparks the obsession that will unleash a legend.

Spoiler warning: This dives into key plot points from Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and how it rewires Mary Shelley's story. Proceed if you want the specifics.

Guillermo del Toro has finally made his Frankenstein, and yes, it leans into the book's heartache while changing a lot of the connective tissue. It starts way before the Creature shows up, in the Frankenstein household, where the seeds of Victor's obsession get planted early and deep.

• Director: Guillermo del Toro
• Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Mia Goth
• Runtime: 2h 29m
• Rotten Tomatoes score (so far): 85%
• Streaming in the US: Netflix

The childhood reset: love, cruelty, and a mother you can never get back

We open at the Frankenstein estate with Christian Convery playing young Victor. His mother, Claire (Mia Goth), is warm and affectionate. His father, Leopold, is the opposite: icy and domineering. That split becomes the emotional engine of the film. When Claire dies during childbirth, Victor blames Leopold for not saving her, and that grief hardens into a fixation on outsmarting death.

Here is where del Toro makes one of his boldest choices: Mia Goth plays both Claire and Elizabeth. Elizabeth is essentially Victor's sister-in-law (she's engaged to Victor's brother, William), and that casting doubles down on Victor's lifelong need to recapture the kind of love his mother gave him. It's an intentionally uncanny echo, and it works because it makes Victor's later choices feel less like mad-science theatrics and more like unresolved trauma in motion.

What the book did vs. what the movie does

If you know Mary Shelley's novel, you can feel the spine of it here, even as the details shift. In the book, Victor's parents are Alphonse and Caroline Frankenstein. They have three sons and adopt a daughter, Elizabeth. Caroline dies of scarlet fever after nursing Elizabeth through the illness. On her deathbed, she lays out a very specific wish for Victor's future.

"My firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union."

That setup obviously does not fly in 2025. Del Toro sidesteps the adopted-sister-to-wife storyline and the deathbed marriage request entirely. In the film, the mother is Claire (not Caroline), she dies in childbirth (not scarlet fever), and Elizabeth is not adopted but promised to Victor's brother William. The result keeps the same emotional core — Victor's need to beat death after losing his mother — without the book's more eyebrow-raising family dynamics.

The 'first misfortune' and the 'omen' get reinterpreted

In Shelley's version, Caroline's death is the first domino Victor recognizes — his "first misfortune." He withdraws from everyone who loves him and buries himself in study, chasing a way to master life and death so he never has to feel that loss again. Later, after the chaos that follows the Creature's creation, Victor looks back and calls his mother's death an "omen" of all the misery to come. When the Creature kills Elizabeth in the novel, it's a grim loop closing: the obsession sparked by his mother's loss ends with the destruction of the woman who replaced that maternal softness in his life. It wipes out nearly every form of female companionship he had left.

Del Toro heads a different direction in the back half. The film gives Elizabeth a connection to the Creature that plays more like a tragic romance. The Creature attacks Victor; Victor shoots him; Elizabeth walks in and gets caught in the crossfire. The Creature carries her to a cave where they share a tender moment before she dies. It's a big swing that swaps the book's merciless symmetry for something more mournful and intimate — very del Toro.

So what does this version actually keep?

The feelings. Victor's obsession still grows from the same wound: a boy who loses his mother and decides he can make sure no one ever leaves him again if he can just outrun mortality. The movie changes the logistics — names, relationships, circumstances — but the emotional math is clearly Shelley's.

Oscar Isaac plays Victor with that haunted intensity you want from this character, and del Toro's choice to have Mia Goth embody both the lost mother and the idealized love interest is a neat, slightly unnerving touch that tells you exactly who Victor is without anyone saying it out loud.

What do you think about these tweaks — smart modernization or too far from the text? Frankenstein is streaming in the US on Netflix.