If you’ve forgotten what it feels like to be moved by a film, that’s okay. I had forgotten too.

It’s been a long time since cinema, as art, has truly transported me somewhere else. Another world, another version of reality. As a Production Designer, I have a theory about why.

In the beginning, cinema was pure art. A painting turned into a photograph, that moved eventually. Filmmakers who were also photographers and painters breathed life into stories that could carry us across worlds, cultures, dimensions. Artists who could transport us with nothing but their eye. For a few hours, we stopped being ourselves to become others, with other lives, other bodies, stuffed with memories we never actually lived.

Like the Creature in Frankenstein, the artistic experience of cinema places us in a world where death isn’t real, once we are all invention and fantasy. And when the film ends, we come back home, carrying glimpses of things that don’t belong to us, borrowed emotions, and that soft kind of melancholy, which reminds us that real life can be lonely too.

And this is where Del Toro feels a little like Victor Frankenstein himself. Stitching styles, machines, effects and textures, he takes what existed only in his imagination and turns it into something breathing right in front of us.

Of course, this isn’t exactly new for him. In Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), he was already doing the same thing, only more refined each time. He tells stories with the tenderness of someone who understands humanity from the inside out.

His use of practical effects — real materials, real textures, real objects on a real set — together with how actors are shaped through dramatic methods, especially those rooted in Stanislavski and Stella Adler, don’t just create a visual atmosphere. They ground the emotion, making it almost tangible.

Meanwhile, the industry keeps chasing speed, formulas, and safe money. And somewhere in that rush, the art slowly thins out. So when someone like Del Toro returns with something like this, the effect hits immediately. It’s like coming up for air after too many seconds underwater. Or waking up from a deep sleep and remembering what life felt like before.

And beyond this artistic act in Frankenstein, Del Toro reminds us once again that the Creatures of fiction — however monstrous they may seem — are still more alive than many of us who sit before the screen.

Frankenstein is now on Netflix, along with a documentary about its creative process. Watch it with your heart open.