It was always gonna be hard after PAN’S LABYRINTH. Guillermo de Toro made his major market entrance with such rich visual language and a fabulist storyteller’s gift for imbuing the fairy tale with the mundane grit of human history. Since then some things have worked (THE SHAPE OF WATER) while others felt like that visual style masked a tentative story (CRIMSON PEAK).

Props to del Toro for going all in and tackling what I’ve always considered the great unfilmable book: FRANKENSTEIN. Unless you consider James Whale’s adaptation(s). And Mel Brooks’. And John Frankenheimer’s. Oh, and Keneth Branagh’s. (Just kidding.) For a story whose own author pretty much wrote it twice (published first, anonymously, in 1818, then heavily revised in 1831) it’s as if Mary Shelley knew this was the start of something big—bigger than its progenitor could even imagine.

So, to my surprise, Guillermo del Toro gives us what I consider the finest adaptation made after 1831–because it synthesizes the nascent sci-fi creepiness of the 1818 with the trenchant moral inquiries of the 1831. It’s the filmmaker’s most apt challenge—one to which he rises. For the most part.

At times it’s a grotesque period horror story reminiscent of the Hammer adaptations movies (with practical effects and art direction they scarcely could have dreamed of) but in others it’s the thoroughly moving story Shelley resolved to tell in her second edition, about cycles of violence, and the risks we take when we create something new. What I loved most was that the metaphors alive in Mary Shelley’s story can be read on any scale—for their immediate and visceral thrills or for their hardscrabble human truths. And Guillermo del Toro tapped into it on multiple levels.

I won’t bore you with my small gripes (unless in the comments) other than to say it’s gotta be hard to tell this story on this scale and make it come out this satisfying.

Bonus points to the director and his art department for a nod to paperback readers. I’ve seen a few paperbacks over the years using Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, ‘Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog’ as the cover art. I know the Dover Thrift edition does, and I could swear Bantam did, too. Our earliest glimpses of Oscar Isaac’s Victor shows him—attire and hair, in facsimile to the subject. Fun trivia the painting was finished in 1818, the same year the book was first published.