S Y N A P S I S

In Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) and Frankenstein (2025), the figure of the monster operates as a powerful commentary on violence, trauma, and healing. Posing the central question of what care looks like when our institutions—medical, political, and scientific—fail to provide it, del Toro’s monsters ask us if the clinic, the lab, and the state all claim a certain authority over the body, then who heals, who resists cure, and what does care look like beyond the clinic? What I offer here, then, is a meditation on these monstrous bodies as critical sites of repair through humanization and empathy production through relationality.

Take the Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water (2017): captured from a South American river and kept captive in a laboratory for study, he is housed within what could be described as nothing short of a temple to biomedical rationality. Sterile, scientific, and emphatically carceral, the film’s laboratory suggests that to “care” for a body is to contain, study, and ultimately (try to) cut it open in the name of knowledge. The film subsequently gives us science (and indeed, medicine) at its most extractive—understanding through invasion.

Enter Elisa—a mute janitor, caretaker, and practitioner of an entirely different (and entirely radical) health paradigm. While the film’s Cold War logic theorizes the Amphibian Man as a valuable commodity to be experimented on, understood, and harvested, Elisa’s care practices are stubbornly small and emphatically unproductive (if one were to compare them to the prescriptive steps of the scientific method, that is). Drawing from Dori Laub, who discusses “the hidden voice” of one’s trauma and contends that “I had to hear it first, acknowledge that I spoke its language, identify myself to it, acknowledge both to myself and to my patient, who I really was, so that it would be possible for him or her to really speak,” though Elisa and the Amphibian Man do not vocally communicate, their shared language, through which the “hidden voice” of their individual traumas and pasts can be heard and acknowledged comes through food (64). The hard-boiled eggs that she brings the Amphibian Man are cheap, ordinary, and strikingly mundane—constituting everyday food prepared and peeled slowly and meticulously by hand. The act—repeated day after day—produces no data, yields no advantage against enemies or rival labs, and garners no control. And yet, something like healing begins through a shared language, nevertheless.

This is, I would argue, care untethered from, and uninvested in, cure. Care here does not hold stakes in restoring the monstrous or “othered” body to some pre-determined state of “normalcy,” but rather prioritizes sustaining relation and holistic wellbeing. Applying Judith Herman’s notion of how social movements afford us with “a new language for understanding” here, we can deepen our understanding of how Elisa and the Amphibian Man share such a language—one more so of affect, emotions, and mutual recognition, rather than the spoken word—when empathy is given and received (30). Crucially, in the film’s concluding scene, the Amphibian Man is not assimilated into the human world; instead, del Toro allows Elisa to become other—to breathe differently, move differently, and live beyond the limits imposed on her body. Her scars, once marking injury and difference by way of muteness, transform into gills and become vital organs of life. In clinical terms, nothing has necessarily or objectively been “fixed.” Instead, del Toro offers a rather radical alternative ethics of humanity and healing rooted in relationality; what if health is not exclusively about returning to a “normal,” but sometimes about living in a state of “otherwise?”

If The Shape of Water (2017) imagines care beyond the clinic, del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) shifts this question of how bodies survive and heal from violence by becoming otherwise to what happens when creation and the pursuit of medical knowledge outpace responsibility. Set in a nineteenth-century world informed by Enlightenment rationalism, infused with emerging industrial modernity, and steeped in rising faith in science’s ability to master (and even outdo) nature and the constraints of the human body, the film masterfully portrays a moment in which scientific progress is cleanly severed from ethical responsibility. Literally made from the “assorted body parts from executed criminals and deceased soldiers from the Crimean War,” the Creature is not only a birth but also a sort of rebirth—a second chance at life for the bodies traumatized by war that shall only be re-traumatized.

This is evocative of what Cathy Caruth has theorized as the “story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (4). Drawing from this notion of the return of a past trauma, which bleeds into the present to haunt and to claim space until it is recognized, heard, and acknowledged, the grotesqueness of the Creature is also then the grotesqueness of not only dead bodies woven together but also the dead bodies of past traumas and violences resurrected, screaming out for redemption and repair that has yet to come. Indeed, it is difficult by the end of the film not to humanize and empathize with the Creature, whose searching, emotional eyes truly do echo Victor’s traumas, the dead bodies’ traumas, and the Creature’s own traumas—constituting an amalgam of violences sewn together and ventriloquized by one feeling Creature seeking compassion and empathy in a world that sanctioned its creation for the betterment and advancement of science and humanity but shunned it shortly after the fact.

Ultimately, Guillermo del Toro’s monsters refuse and actively challenge the fantasy that healing must look like correction, containment, or cure. Dori Laub observes while listening to a trauma survivor’s testimony that “it is as though a secret password has been uttered, in the expectation that it be passed over once again; a word by which the patient names himself and asks against all odds for a reciprocal identification” (63). Similarly, del Toro’s monsters potently insist—sometimes tenderly, and sometimes violently—that care is fundamentally a question of relation, not always one of formal cure.

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