It was surely inevitable that Guillermo del Toro, that master of creatures and monsters and Gothic gorgeousness (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Shape of Water,” “Crimson Peak”), would one day take on the greatest Gothic monster tale of them all: Mary Shelley’s horror story “Frankenstein,” a classic conceived on a legendary rainy night around the fire more than two centuries ago, with its author still in her teens.

Its premise is both simple and unspeakable: A mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, in a wonderfully operative performance), becomes obsessed with creating life from death, stitching together pieces of corpses in his candlelit laboratory. The creature does, of course, come to life — only for Victor, to quote Shelley in her introduction to the novel, to “rush away from his od

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