Aarcflick

“Frankenstein” is a masterstroke, a thrilling rebuttal to the conventional wisdom about dreamlike projects. The writer-director creates something almost new, and certainly rich and strange, from a story we all thought we knew well. The 21st-century film achieves this by staying faithful to its 19th-century source. Not exactly faithful: Mary Shelley's novel was completed in 1818, and the film is set in 1857, several years after the author's death. Setting the story squarely in the Victorian era anchors it in elements of the period more familiar to the contemporary viewer, one assumes; it also allows its visionary (at least at first) scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) to use electricity more intensively when animating his creature. Director: Guillermo del Toro Writers: Guillermo del Toro, Mary Shelley Stars: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz But del Toro's setting is entirely inspired by the original. The film begins near the end of the novel, in the Arctic,...