There is a moment, those ten suspended seconds when the lights die out and silence falls, a silence so dense it amplifies the racing heartbeat of expectation. Then the screen flickers to life, and the vertigo begins. It is in that fragile instant, when the audience is still holding its breath, that Jacob Elordi appears: Guillermo Del Toro’s Creature.
Gone is the caricature of the green monster with bolts in its neck: what stands before us is a body desperately searching for a place in the world. As the actor himself confessed in Venice: “I am Frankenstein: my weaknesses, my sense of exclusion, everything I have lived.”

Elordi arrives with an almost architectural presence, yet under Del Toro’s gaze he is fractured, bent, reshaped until he becomes something fragile as glass. His Creature towers, but his eyes betray him: within them trembles the child, yearning for an embrace withheld. He is not an actor “pretending” to be a monster, but a man surrendering to the ghost of what he never received: the chance to be loved.

The weight of makeup and prosthetics, so overwhelming they made even casual conversation in the makeup chair a struggle, would have silenced most actors. Yet in Elordi they do not smother; they reveal. He invents a new language: the language of the body. The way he bends, the pauses in his breathing, the curve of shoulders hunched as though to shield a fragile heart; every gesture becomes a line of poetry. The body ceases to be a shell and becomes a battlefield, where life fights to reclaim its ground against abandonment. Even the voice, hoarse and fractured like the Creature itself, plays its part; words dragged reluctantly into existence, each syllable a victory, each sound a gift torn from silence.

In Frankenstein, Del Toro finds in Jacob Elordi his truest mirror. The camera caresses him as one would a sacred relic, for the heart of this Creature is the beating heart of the film itself. No beauty can exist without soul as Giorgio Armani, mourned by Italy, the world, and the Festival only days after the premiere, taught us. And here the soul is carried entirely by Elordi: in his pain, his grace, his desperate plea to be heard.

There is one scene destined never to fade: the Creature stretches out his hand to his Creator. A gesture at once simple and immense, bearing the weight of the human condition; the finger of Adam reaching toward God, the thirst for recognition, the wound of discovering oneself unwanted and unloved, yet still borne aloft by the invincible hope of being seen. In the theater, that moment was an invocation, a cry shared by all. The gothic myth dissolves into something more intimate: the portrait of what it means to be born fragile.

When a tear slips down the Creature’s face, the audience no longer perceives prosthetics or makeup, but the naked face of a man. And they weep with him. For in that instant, illusion dissolves. Elordi takes us by the hand and, through his “monstrosity,” leads us past cinema itself into the shared territory of vulnerability.

At the film’s end, the applause crashes over the room like a tidal wave, lasting more than 13-minute. Yet what endures is the image of Elordi, no longer able to chain back his own emotion, weeping like his Creature. On the red carpet he bore the stature of a star; on screen and in the theater he surrendered instead the intimacy of a man willing to be broken. And this is the miracle: not becoming an icon, but allowing others to recognize themselves in one’s own wound.

For Elordi, working with Del Toro is a leap: no longer the idolized body of his earlier roles, but a body denied, cursed, born of mistake. It is as if every step of his career has led to this role, this liberation from cliché, this revelation of his truest self: an actor unafraid to be vulnerable. At only twenty-seven, in Del Toro’s Frankenstein, Elordi is no longer a mask, he is a wound.

Del Toro’s film reminds us that no horror is greater than loneliness. Jacob Elordi embodies this horror with a purity seldom seen on screen. He gives the Creature a voice that will never again require words, a body that will never again need explanation. The secret of his performance is simple, and devastating: to show us that the monster is nothing but our own reflection and that if we wept with him, it is because in his tears we recognized our own.