Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein comes with a massive weight of anticipation. An undead weight. The Mexican auteur whose career has been built on making us fall for monsters has long had Mary Shelley’s definitive novel in his sights. Since winning the Academy Award for The Shape of Water (as much Frankenstein as Creature from the Black Lagoon), that calling has only strengthened, and now, thanks to the partnership with Netflix, the perfect fusion of creator and creation is bankrolled.

For all the films that draw on Frankenstein, a story with a good claim to founding modern horror and science fiction, it’s been a long time since a high-profile adaptation had any pretence of adapting Shelley’s text with this degree of faithfulness. The result of GDT’s devotion deserves more than being pored over on streaming. 

It’s a lucious, extravagant, visually jaw-dropping adaptation, with a poetic choreography to its characters’ moves. In the vast sprawling spectacle, however, some key choices keep it chained in the basement.

With his ship trapped near the North Pole, single-minded Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) takes aboard an injured man with an impossible tale. He is Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), a scientific prodigy stalked by his past mistakes. He tells the captain of his childhood, when, brutalised by his surgeon father (Charles Dance) and losing his mother during the birth of his brother (Felix Kammerer), he vowed to eliminate death. When his ideas are thrown out of medical school in Edinburgh, he lands the support of arms dealer Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), the uncle of Victor’s brother’s fiancée, Elizabeth (Mia Goth). 

The weapons dealer provides the money and insight into battles for Victor to realise his experiments and create life from death. But as the creature explains, when he picks up the story, Victor’s breakthrough was left to educate itself and learn the brutality of nature first-hand. When he later confronted his creator to create a mate for him and spare his loneliness, Victor’s refusal led to death, destruction and a chase to the North.

True to the director’s oeuvre, GDT’s Frankenstein ramps up the fairytale elements and  melodrama of this “modern Prometheus.” It isn’t a particularly faithful adaptation, and misses some chances to dig deep into the richer morals of Shelley’s 1818 novel, leaving this lengthy film (150 minutes) feeling markedly unbalanced. 

It’s not the perspective split, which wisely lets both parts of the equations complete the story’s warning. The narrative framework, constantly returning to the creature attacking, circling or boarding the Danish ship, keeps things alive with tension and more action than the source novel afforded (although it won’t be enough for some).

But it’s where we spend time on  each side of the vital central equation that counts. As the monster, Elordi is extraordinary. His slender 6 feet and five inches, coated in a patchwork of different coloured flesh, and (finally!) the authentic supernaturally black lank hair, makes a striking and magnetic presence. In the best possible way, he just doesn’t look real in the scenes set in the weeks after his creation. This vision of the monster owes a lot to the evocative sketches of the late Bernie Wrightson (who GDT has frequently referenced and receives a nod in the credits), casting a striking silhouette against the sun in the Arctic as much as an inhuman shadow when freshly born. 

His part of the story is more interesting, not least because the fiery gift of life Frankenstein passes on grants immortality to his creation, but it leaves us short shrift compared to his attention-grabbing creator.

Isaac’s Baron Frankenstein is a scientist devoid of love—something ripped from him in the red-soaked gothic swooshes of his childhood. He may develop an obsession with Elizabeth (‘life’ as he calls Goth’s floating but stern flower) in the comical, courting clash of the pair, but her primary function is to embrace the monster and shun the maker.

The Baron should be driven, selfish and yes, unlikable, but Isaac’s version has no discernible saving grace beyond his mind, and the story gives us nothing to empathise with. Even his love for Elizabeth is twisted, unbelievable and spurned. Shelley famously received the idea for her novel in a fever dream, later incorporating it into the moment Victor realises his experiment has worked. GDT eschews this, instead twisting the creator’s abrogation of responsibility into his prolonged failure as a new parent. He wants to make us feel it, really feel it. The result emerges not as a tribute to the brutality of the early Frankenstein adaptations, but as the same kind of filmic shorthand they relied on. The prolonged scenes of Frankenstein and his creature failing to connect resolve as the Baron’s resentment of himself and his evident failure. It doesn’t set the scene for what follows.

Isaac’s devotion to the role isn’t in doubt, but in his extended character era, it’s a shame there wasn’t more manner to the manic. He has a ham in his chops for the early narration. Later, the Baron’s sneering at his creature’s demands (“Reproduction!?”) is unfortunately laughable.

This Victor is wholly unsuitable to be a father—perhaps the reason GDT rinses him of the ability to hold a relationship—but despite the inability to realise that the monster’s world truly only includes him (“Victor”), a neat insight from Elizabeth, and an example of the film’s sometimes brilliant script, it feels like another prolonged workaround of that issue of responsibility. We spend more time with this stubborn, sulky scientist than with the product of his genius when both are able to reason and debate.

The trade-off is a shortened rivalry, with the one deadly night in Geneva spinning the mature monster and his father into an underplayed sprint to the finish. This film is calling out for the emotive meeting in the slopes of the Alps, which there was even time for in Whale’s 1931 71-minute film. Instead, we get a rushed, mad, inexplicably single meeting that sets them on their path. That lack of reasoning and threat isn’t worth the trade-off fleshing out the Elizabeth subplot of the first half, or the length of time Victor spends being frustrated with his newborn, and it undoubtedly takes away from the pair’s final meeting.

There’s a sense that GDT’s take isn’t so much Frankenstein unbound, but on steroids. It’s all designed to be big. The addition of Harlander turns the Baron’s obsession into a scientific arms race. There’s an interesting dynamic between the capitalism of war and breaking down the barriers of science, but watching the scientist operating with abandon, with underlings to gather the corpses from the battlefield and unlimited resources to create the perfect machinery, further diminishes Frankenstein’s graft. There always tends to be one gratuitous and crude moment in GDT’s films, and here it falls to the short and sharp revelations around Herr Harlander. Waltz’s screen roles tend toward mutilation. While there had to be a cost to what’s clearly established as a deal with the devil, it’s a quick, blunt, and not the only character point that’s over-ladled. 

While the story is a mixed bag, there’s no doubt it has a propulsive march through the heady swirl of GDT’s incredible visuals and Alexander Desplat’s sumptuous score. The gore is fantastic, although it is less frequent than it could be. The half-cadavers of Victor’s galvanism, given some form of life by his glowing steampunk batteries, are hideous, with a guttural, deep bass that echoes from the afterlife. The stitching scenes, with the buzz of flies and sliding of iceblocks, are magnificent, as is the high-stakes resurrection. 

Despite the character flaws that obscure the central Promethean point (something mentioned more than acted on), the sawing, stitching and splicing of bones may not take up much screentime, but it’s worth a month’s Netflix subscription. This is primal, high-quality body horror at its pumping gothic heart. It’s just a shame that the central pair don’t shine as two sides of the same coin.