Frankenstein review: "A classy, if somewhat safe, adaptation"

"Who hurt you?" Mia Goth's Elizabeth asks Jacob Elordi's 'monster' when she first encounters him, fetal in the bowels of a damp medical basement. It's a question that Guillermo del Toro is looking to unpick in his sumptuous, long-gestated retelling of Mary Shelley's classic, which recalls both Interview With the Vampire and Bram Stoker's Dracula in vibe.

Cleaving closely to the source material, del Toro wants to explore the trauma that makes us, mankind's capacity for cruelty, the death we bring on ourselves through war, and the catharsis of forgiveness – all notions that make Frankenstein relevant in current world politics and social media savagery.

It kicks off with a prologue that plays like a period superhero movie; a Royal Danish ship headed for the North Pole in 1857 encounters broken scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), the quarry for a relentless, invincible hooded figure who dispatches blunderbuss-toting sailors with ease. As he tears through the crew to get to his father/god/nemesis, his visible eye glints red like the Victorian Terminator he is. It's an invigorating start, painterly in production design, as Frankenstein settles in to tell his story to the ship's Captain, in whom he sees a kindred spirit – a driven man determined to fulfill a mission, irrespective of human cost.

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Maker's mark

'Part 1: Victor's Tale' beds us in with the backstory of the milk-drinking mad scientist and the events surrounding his creation (Part 2 is told from the creature's POV). Victor's hurt is seeded in Daddy issues, an Oedipal complex and fraternal jealousy, his grand obsession with reanimating corpses dramatically and ickily displayed by an Edinburgh medical tribunal in which he brings a thrashing head, thorax and arm to life, his ambition and vanity as monstrous as the gasping sideshow he presents. It's like a Body Worlds exhibition, thrumming with life.

This is the first of many impressively gory physical effects (flesh-sawing surgery, bone-snapping injury, sewn chimera) ingeniously realised with minimal CG. It's an artistic ethos brought to Elordi's sinewy Gollum-esque creature when he finally shows up after an hour. Wearing only a loincloth and deploying one word like a meat Groot, he's a creation of mannerism, vocal tone and the actor's dark Bambi eyes over prosthetics.

Facilitated by Christoph Waltz's arms merchant (industrial-scale death bankrolling his search for life), Frankenstein builds a lab in a tower that couldn't be more GDT or more phallic. Victor has a hard-on both for 'conquering death' and his brother's fiancée Elizabeth, a spicy emo in a bonnet who provides some humour during a confessional booth flirt and brings the empathy, morality and kindness so missing from the not-so-good doctor's life.

As Daddy Frankenstein (Charles Dance) explains during his stinging anatomy lessons, women have a different pulmonary muscle than men. It's Elizabeth's heart (Goth is incandescant) and the humanity of the 'monster' that drive the emotional beats and make this tale a disquieting, but ultimately hopeful, reflection of ourselves. A "tall specimen with long limbs", the nearly seven-foot-tall Elordi succeeds in conveying small, fearful, hurt, oppressed – a lab rat shivering in a cage – eliciting immediate sympathy with a dextrous physical performance which evolves from cowering animal to ferocious beast.

Monster movie

Beautiful mirroring and colour signalling are key to the visual syntax of del Toro's expectedly lush direction, and a treat in themselves. Blood red is Frankenstein's palette (his mother's swirling scarlet dress kicking off a lifelong obsession with playing God and wearing ruby neckerchiefs/gloves). Elizabeth, meanwhile, is a stunning symphony of alive jewel-tone – the moment she is first seen is so beautiful a tableau, you'll want a pause button. Her last moments on screen are just as ravishing in composition.

Equally, Victor is constantly reflected as he talks disparagingly about 'it' being 'wicked and deformed', the monster and man in counterpoint. It's the sort of language we might recognise in current-day political factions describing their enemies, world leaders assessing 'nasty' opponents.

Del Toro, of course, specialises in the 'other' as hero and man as horror (Pan's Labyrinth, The Shape of Water), and here he reinforces that concept with pleasing visual symmetry. Elizabeth's back-laced corsets recall the exposed spines of experiments, Victor's prosthetic leg, the stitched body parts of his specimen, a child's reading card replicated in the framing of the creature's peeper peering through a hole.

Though a feast for the eyes and peopled with acting excellence, Frankenstein moves at a stately pace, which may frustrate – the famous moment of lightening-bolt eureka is almost underplayed and doesn't occur until nearly halfway through the picture. That it doesn't deviate dramatically from Shelley's prose may please purists, but disappoint audiences looking for more of a spin.

But a sequence where Victor disavows his creation, displaying his trauma-fuelled heartlessness to fiery effect, is a thrill. And Elordi's nuanced performance and part-Yorkshire accent (picked up from the Northern family the monster observes) whet the appetite for his Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell's incoming Wuthering Heights.

Frankenstein opens in theaters on October 17 and streams on Netflix from November 7. In the meantime, check out our list of the best Netflix movies to watch right now, or look ahead with our list of the upcoming movies still to come this year.