Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi in Horror Classic

Gothic horror influences have rippled through Guillermo del Toro’s incantatory work since the Mexican fantasist burst onto the scene with Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. The writer-director’s encounter with Mary Shelley’s immortal 1818 novel has been a long time coming and after too many screen adaptations to list, it feels like a lightning-charged act of reanimation. The genre-defying craftsman’s sumptuous retelling of Frankenstein honors the essence of the book in that it’s not so much straight-up horror as tragedy, romance and a philosophical reflection on what it means to be human.

Absent or imperfect fathers have been a recurring theme in del Toro’s films, given affecting treatment here in the agonized relationship between egotistical scientist Victor Frankenstein and the unnamed Creature he brings to life out of stitched-together body parts.

Those roles are played, respectively, by Oscar Isaac with the wiry intensity of a tortured artist, his strutting arrogance steadily consumed by remorse; and Jacob Elordi in a revelatory performance notable for its expressive physicality but perhaps even more so for its innocence, its deep well of yearning and the crushing emptiness that follows as the Creature comes to understand who and what he is. The movie questions whether monstrousness is something defined by appearance or actions.

In addition to its emotional force, del Toro’s Frankenstein is a film of heady sensorial pleasures. The director’s celebrated visual imagination — channeled through exceptional work from returning collaborators including cinematographer Dan Lausten, production designer Tamara Deverell and costume designer Kate Hawley — constantly delights the eye. The bold use of color, especially the oversaturated reds and greens that scorch the shadows, is breathtaking. Meanwhile, the ears are massaged by a muscular orchestral score that’s among Alexandre Desplat’s most ravishing work.

Broken down into a Prelude and two parts whose perspective is evident from their titles, Victor’s Tale and The Creature’s Tale, the story begins in the Arctic, where a Danish sea Captain (Lars Mikkelsen) oversees the attempts of his crew to dig their ship out of the ice. Investigating a fire glimpsed across the tundra, they come upon Isaac’s Victor injured and near death, though his sled dogs are unharmed. (His wood and metal prosthetic leg seems a direct nod to Marisa Paredes’ character in The Devil’s Backbone, one of many echoes of del Toro’s filmography peppered throughout.)

The rampaging Creature appears almost as a giant, a towering, hooded form wrapped in animal furs. “Victor. Bring him to me,” he growls, tossing aside crew members that assail him and shoot at him, and using his mighty strength to tilt the ship. When a blunderbuss blast fells the monster and he falls through cracks into the icy waters, the captain assumes their foe is dead. But Victor assures him that the Creature cannot die and will come back; he begs the Danes to leave him out on the ice and let it take him.

Victor tells his story to the Captain, starting with his childhood on a grand family plantation estate that has since been lost. His French mother was his entire world until she died giving birth to her second son. That leaves the young Victor (Christian Convery) at the mercy of his cold, disciplinarian father Leopold Frankenstein (Charles Dance), a distinguished British doctor whom he suspects of saving his infant brother at the cost of his mother’s life.

The action jumps forward to find Victor in 1855 addressing the Royal College of Medicine, demonstrating his early success reanimating dead tissue. The bewigged medical establishment scoffs at the notion of him taking command over the forces of life and death. But for reasons beyond scientific interest that later become clear, wealthy arms merchant Heinrich Harlander (Christophe Waltz) is intrigued enough to fund Victor’s ongoing research and experimentation.

Around this time, Victor’s golden-child younger brother William (Felix Kammerer) resurfaces, now engaged to marry Heinrich’s niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth), whose sharp intellect and scientific curiosity instantly captivate Victor.

Goth’s entrance in a stunning peacock-blue gown and feathered headdress gives her the appearance of an otherworldly creature herself. It’s the first of several looks for Elizabeth fashioned by costumer Hawley — a moss-green veiled outfit and a bejeweled white wedding dress among them — that paint the self-possessed beauty as a figure out of a fairy tale.

While Goth’s “queen of horror” crown is well-established, del Toro appears to have seen something more in the actress, a forthright intelligence, spirit and strength that fortify her character’s porcelain delicacy.

Elizabeth’s embrace of color recalls an eye-popping earlier image of Victor’s mother on the steps of the family’s ancestral home, swathed in blood-red with a long veil billowing in the wind. It also marks her as a maverick free-thinker, much like darkly handsome Victor in his dandy-chic apparel of black and white with red accents; he wears his clothes rock-star snug, unlike other men of the period in their bulky tweeds.

There are jaw-dropping visuals throughout; one of the most striking of them is the huge laboratory built for Victor in a remote castle in coastal Scotland. (Almost all Deverell’s sets were physical constructions built from scratch, like the Danish ship, or composites of existing structures, not CG fabrications.)

Taking their cue from the classic “mad scientist lab” while elevating the setting with the kind of atmospheric detail for which del Toro is famed, the designers equip the space with silver lightning rod conductors attached to an external tower, steam engines and massive vertical convector cylinders. The Latin inscription across the building’s façade — “Aqua est vita” — is appropriate for an experiment born out of a thunderstorm.

Victor initially selects suitable body parts from condemned men just prior to them being hanged. But with the Crimean War escalating, battlefields provide a vast assortment of mutilated cadavers, with plenty of the strong, long-limbed men he requires.

Rather than just a head stitched to a body and rewired with a new brain, Victor’s Creature looks like a ceramic phrenology head attached to a patchwork marble sculpture clothed only in a loincloth of bandages. The rangy Elordi inhabits Mike Hill’s creature design with a beguiling mix of awkwardness and grace, but just as notably, a sensuality that recalls the erotic charge del Toro and Hill gave the amphibious fish man in The Shape of Water.

There’s a heartrending vulnerability to the Creature from his earliest appearances, delighting like a baby in new discoveries like water or leaves. Victor keeps him chained in a large holding area, for the safety of both creator and creation. When Elizabeth discovers him there, as if drawn by instinct, he is enchanted by her ethereal presence while she seems to intuit the Creature’s innate humanity.

But it soon emerges that Victor had not given much thought to what would happen beyond creation. It cuts through his confidence when William wonders: “Did you ever ask yourself, of all the parts that make up that man, which part holds the soul?”

Del Toro acknowledges James Whale’s 1931 masterpiece of the same title as a formative influence and his version draws also from its arguably even better sequel, 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein. That becomes apparent in The Creature’s Tale, when he escapes the castle and finds shelter in an isolated farmhouse with a blind old man (David Bradley, wonderful), overjoyed to have companionship. One of the film’s most touching moments is the Creature learning the word “friend.” That’s just the beginning of his education, with books opening up a whole world of language and knowledge.

The great sorrow of the story is the incomprehension between “father and son,” but the Creature’s shattering experience of loss is what takes the pathos to another level.

The desolation that engulfs him when he discovers through Victor’s notebook that he’s “a wretch assembled from the refuse and discards of death” is worsened by the realization that absolute death will remain elusive to him, denying him a remedy for his pain. When hunters shoot him down at one point, his inner thoughts emerge as a searing eternal torment: “There was silence again, and then merciless life.”

The quote from Byron with which del Toro closes the film — “And thus the heart will break and yet brokenly live on” — clearly indicates the director’s vision of Frankenstein as an operatic Romantic tragedy. “I cannot die. And I cannot live alone,” the Creature tells Victor during a fateful confrontation. Elordi’s dark, soulful eyes convey a piercing sadness not felt from this character since Boris Karloff’s haunted work in the Whale films, which made him one of the screen forefathers of the pitiable monster.

There’s complexity also in the emotional range of Isaac’s stirring performance as Victor, a traumatized son who, in attempting to play God, fathers his own traumatized son in the lab. The fall from grace of this visionary genius devastated by the ramifications of what he has done is a tragedy no less mournful than the Creature’s.

One of del Toro’s finest, this is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon beauty, feeling and artistry. While Netflix is giving this visual feast just a three-week theatrical run ahead of its streaming debut, it begs to be experienced on the big screen.