Frankenstein (15)

Guillermo del Toro’s long gestating passion project is finally upon us, as Mary Shelley’s seminal work receives the lavish treatment it so desperately deserves.

Sticking very closely to the source material, we begin at the end, in the Arctic, as the crew of a ship frozen in ice encounter Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) and his raging creation (Jacob Elordi) that’s pursued him to the end of the earth, we learn of the terrible preceding events: Victor’s cold upbringing under a disciplinarian father (Charles Dance) after the death of his beloved mother (Mia Goth); his entry into the medical profession and his vow, inspired by trauma, to reanimate dead tissue; his granting of life to a jumbled corpse; his subsequent ill-treatment of the poor, innocent ‘monster’; and his creation’s turn from nobility to violence when he’s warped by cruelty.

Frankenstein is a film of heady sensorial pleasures; del Toro's sense of design constantly hits you with ravishing moments of gothic splendor. This is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry. It’d be a monumental waste to watch it on Netflix; it deserves to be experienced here on the big screen.