Frankenstein

Bluesky

Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein, let us carefully put a name to it. Names are labels, with weight attached. Victor means something, Adam means something, Prometheus means something. Horizon means something too, the name of the Danish ship whose iron-clad hull is another modern voyager in a hostile environment. Trapped in ice, its namesake is lit with gradients of blue and orange, fire and ice, as the sun and moon dance above farthermost North.

The first of colours as key, an emotional palette capturing any quantity of craft. Dan Laustsen's cameras have served del Toro's visions before, Tamara Deverell's production design and Kate Hawley's costuming have the same. Stitching, lacing, veils, all important, and upon whom they are found and when they are seen all matter. There are blacks and browns and greens and reds, a warning for injury detail doesn't begin to cover the anatomical horrors. Spray of blood and moments of humour don't grab the way dead fingers are drawn closed by sewn sinews. There are plenty of injuries too. An imaginary four-barrelled blunderbuss is not enough to stop the Beast though it makes plenty of noise in the process. That's one of a small handful of fantastic elements that don't relate to the creature and its creation, there are actual antecedents in the form of the Nock gun and double-barrelled cousins, but the strongest precedent seems to be a fictional firearm kept at Wisconsin's House on the Rock.

It's one of innumerable references to other creations and creativity that are as obvious as an outright quote from Frankenstein's author's spouse's work Ozymandias and as subtle as gold soles on a pair of shoes. Much cheaper than paving the streets, that. We meet many of the Frankensteins, casting choices meaning we meet some of them twice. The Baron, Leopold, an imperious and demanding Charles Dance, names Victor (Christian Convery, then Oscar Isaac), a measure against which younger brother William (Felix Kammerer) is repeatedly judged. It is his fiancée Elizabeth (Mia Goth) whose uncle (Christoph Waltz) brings financial fuel to Victor's researches, and if these chains of dependency and introduction seem complex they are the ones forged in life.

That life is played by Jacob Elordi, a scale and scope that is at once towering and delicate. Slender and ominous, an echo of the reanimated tower where he was reborn. Birth, death, rebirth, they abound with the same clarity as those colours. Blues, yellows, greens, on the big screen like being confronted with whole gallery walls. The ice a frieze, Edinburgh's old town a fresco, stately homes halls of mirrors, the laboratory unhygienic and unheimlich. Anatomy, psychology, all there to dissect and delight. There are architectures of authority tiled and titled. Ivory may not bleed but it's still a bloody trade. Lecturing becomes hectoring. Theses are defended against what is more prosecution than interlocution. There is a magnetism to it all.

It is to be adored. I can point to tiny moments where digital effects for flame and liquid are not yet perfect but we are seeing tales told. Lars Mikkelsen's Sea Captain is our interpreter for repetitions of things seen by travellers from an ancient land. There is a dark angel whose movements might owe something to automata or puppetry and in that become recursive too. I know that some things were probably miniatures, others sets, some likely post-processed because I've walked those streets, and if I am forgiving - and I am inclined to be - these minor failings in the act of creation are apt and earned.

Del Toro has made changes that parallel some of the ambition of Francis Ford Coppola's differently eponymous Dracula but its excesses are better supported, its style has substance. Oceans of time separate the two works, four score and nine between the novels and three and thirty years between the films. They've more in common than clifftop castles and brides. If anything, Dracula stumbled down blind aisles so this Frankenstein could sail smoothly.

For the same reasons I adore Nightmare Alley I was caught up in this, and what few caveats I have are of the same type. This work is as much an act of creation as that film was a trick. Del Toro has found a new spark in making more than one name matter. For any fans of his it is a must, but the same is true for Isaac, Goth, Waltz too. Physics and music, plenty to fall. Screening early in cinemas across the UK as part of the London Film Festival this Frankenstein is one that rewards the big screen audience. No sooner had I seen it than I wanted to watch it again, to look, to absorb, to revel. Look on these works, ye mighty, and delight.

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