Movie theater. The American press excited by Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein”, a “sumptuous melodrama”

For anyone familiar with Guillermo del Toro’s filmography, it is no surprise that the Mexican filmmaker has a passion for Frankenstein. The surprise would rather be that we had to wait until his 13th^e feature film, released this November 7 on Netflix, to adapt the classic gothic novel dating from 1818. And the American press is practically unanimous: the result largely lives up to expectations.

So, for The New York Times, the meeting between Mary Shelley and the director is obvious, but it is also a resolutely personal interpretation that del Toro offers. “This sumptuous melodrama, deeply romantic and terribly moving, is a reflection on filial relationships, love, marginality, and the monstrosity of humanity. Abandoned creatures struggle to try to understand an abominable world, which their creators, their parents, have never really understood either.”

“Mary Shelley provided the skeleton, but the flesh on these bones is unmistakably that of Guillermo del Toro.”

Jacob Elordi, an extraordinary performance

The broad outlines of the story are known, but the director, who also wrote the screenplay for this adaptation, takes some liberties with the chronology of the story and the characters. Alissa Wilkin