THE MEETING PLACE: THE “I–YOU” IN GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S FRANKENSTEIN

Abstract

This article examines Frankenstein (2024), directed by Guillermo del Toro, as a work that reinterprets Mary Shelley’s myth to explore contemporary tensions between technology, ethics, and humanity within a post-humanist horizon. The analysis identifies multiple layers, scientific, technological, symbolic, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic, that expose the fractures of modernity and the ambivalence between creation and destruction, autonomy and vulnerability, artifice and compassion. The film is also read as an expression of del Toro’s own search for meaning, shaped by personal loss, the experience of orphanhood, and his long-standing identification with the creature as a figure of displacement and existential solitude. The central focus of the study is the philosophical dimension of the encounter, framed by Martin Buber’s categories “I–It” and “I–Thou,” in dialogue with Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics of the face and Gabriel Marcel’s notion of faithful presence. From this perspective, the article distinguishes two relational modes represented in the film: the near-encounter with Elizabeth, marked by objectification, and the authentic encounter with the old blind man, who receives the creature as a presence rather than an object. This moment constitutes the creature’s passage from the regime of “It” to that of “Thou,” functioning as an epiphany of alterity. Consequently, the film becomes an aesthetic and existential meditation on creation, ethical responsibility, and the emergence of the human in the relational space opened by the encounter.