In Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” a wide-ranging vision is presented on Netflix

However, the first time we encounter the creature, we see almost nothing about him at all: he is a faceless ghost, wearing a dark cloak and a vengeful mood, coldly stalking his creator, Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). It’s 1857, and we’re somewhere in the North Pole. A ship bound for the North Pole is trapped in the ice, and its stranded sailors, led by Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen), provide shelter for Victor, who is badly injured. Much of this stems from the novel, although Shelley must have left out the part where the creature kills several sailors with its bare hands and suffers a fatal error on the part of the ship, which apparently results in its death. But then, in del Toro’s brilliant touch, the creature’s skeletal fingers do a spidery tap dance in the snow—a sign that it’s about to launch itself back into battle. In a sweet nod to the whale, one of them exclaimed, “It is Still alive!”

Through a stroke of ingenuity, the creature is temporarily detained, giving the weakened Victor enough time to regale the good Captain with the story of his life. In a long flashback, we meet young Victor (Christian Convery), a sensitive, dark-haired child born to enormous privilege but also subjected to brutal parental abuse. His father, Baron Leopold Frankenstein (Charles Dance, as creepy as ever), is a surgeon; He trains his son with his medical expertise and delivers a good punch when drilling isn’t enough. Victor is much closer to his mother, Claire (Mia Goth), a shy, nurturing soul, but not for long. She dies giving birth to a second son, William, and for Victor, tragedy becomes fate: he is determined to conquer death, to transcend his father’s legacy, by learning to create a new life. The suave Convery suddenly turns into Isaac, who steps into the role with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a possessed man.

One of the bitter ironies of the tale is that Victor would become a more demanding, neglectful, and largely destructive father figure than Leopold ever was. Del Toro, ever attuned to the details of the operation, turns the logistics of resuscitation into a series of referendums on Victor’s humanity. As he calmly picks his way through freshly fallen corpses on the battlefield, Victor displays more than a purely scientific detachment; Later, you’ll expect him to whistle as he works, cutting off limbs from corpses. God is in the details, and del Toro takes great pleasure in them; No less than Victor, he is an expert in carnage. Much scientific attention is also given to the science of electrical storage, enabling the body to function as a permanently recharged battery, and to the use of a massive lightning rod mechanism, which would harness lightning from atop an isolated tower, where Victor is conducting his experiments. (The wonderfully spiky production design, by Tamara Deverell, has a clear case of Zodiac Syndrome.) When the creature comes to life spectacularly, though not quite as planned, Victor is dazzled for about five minutes before he seems to lose interest. He sees only the flaws – not the strange and unexpected miracles – in his design.

If you’ve missed the feeling of family history cruelly repeating itself, here’s Mia Goth again, this time playing Elizabeth, the fiancée of Victor’s younger brother, William (Felix Kammerer). When Victor falls in love with her, it’s the film’s sly way of emphasizing his mama-boy complex—an Oedipal touch underscored by Kate Hawley’s gorgeous costumes, who dress both Claire and Elizabeth in gowns of eye-catching colors and feathers. After Victor imprisons the creature under the stairs, it is Elizabeth who discovers and befriends it, even as she becomes comparatively more disgusted with Victor. Few filmmakers who saw Goth leering leering amid the carnage of “Pearl” (2022) and “Infinity Pool” (2023) would think to portray her as a modest woman. But del Toro is playing a difficult and unclear game; He uses the visual language of horror – a form symbolized by gothic – to push us beyond expectations of horror.

Throughout the film, del Toro flits between contradictory ideas, worrying about the beautiful butterflies that Elizabeth, an amateur entomologist, loves to study. Hoping to liberate the Frankenstein myth from the deadly confines of parody and spoof, del Toro returns to Shelley’s novel with renewed reverence, though few would mistake him for a pure literary one. His inventions come from within matter, but also from within himself; It is as if he is so closely integrated with the text that the deeper he delves into it, the more personal his deviations and embellishments become. There is a recurring image of a resplendent red angel haunting Victor’s childhood dreams. A fiery Catholic painting, it’s a classic del Toro image, reminiscent of the winged Seraph in “Kronos” (1992) and “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (2008).