Parents' Guide to Frankenstein

This passion project from director Guillermo Del Toro emerges as an impressive, operatic spectacle. Frankenstein is both dazzling and deliberately grotesque, and it's marred only by a few pesky flaws. Mary Shelley's story, first filmed as a feature in (1931) by James Whale and later adapted into a 1983 graphic novel by comics legend Bernie Wrightson, has always meant the world to Del Toro. In this film, he pours this love into the characters, showing Victor being raised by a cold, vicious father. When it's Victor's turn to become a "father" to the newly created Creature, he has no idea how to show understanding or kindness, only cruelty and punishment. (When he throws open the shades, he declares "sun!"—which sounds like "son!"—and then grows enraged when the Creature doesn't seem to comprehend.) Del Toro then generates empathy by telling the Creature's story in the movie's second half, grappling with his overwhelming loneliness.

As with Del Toro's Nightmare Alley, design here is supreme, a character in itself. Spaces are cavernous yet intricate, ominous yet detailed. A woman's dress is decorated with what looks like red spatters. In one scene, Victor rips off his shirt and tumbles into bed, wearing red gloves and sleeping under blood-red sheets. The Creature's design is almost elegant, its patchwork skin laid out in sections like plates on a tortoise shell. Only Alexandre Desplat's spirited score doesn't always seem to work; one gory sequence of slicing and dicing flesh is jarringly matched with music that sounds circus-y. And the digital effects are far from seamless, sometimes appearing too rubbery and artificial. But all in all, Del Toro has given viewers a Frankenstein that's worthy of its subtitle, "modern Prometheus."