Review: Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein'

Guillermo del Toro does nothing by half measures, and his Frankenstein —premiering here at the Venice Film Festival —is so visually ornate, so charged with supersized feelings, that it feels a bit like four and a half movies squeezed into one. That’s both a plus and a minus. This is a story split into two parts: The first is told from the point of view of Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac , a brilliant but arrogant scientist who builds a living man from the spare parts of various corpses, only to realize he can’t control the creature he’s created. In the second, the creature—played by Jacob Elordi , made up to look like an oversize god made of veined, moving marble—tells his part of the story. He never asked to be brought into the world, yet there he is, yearning to be