The most surprising thing about Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is that he hadn’t already made it. The influence of Mary Shelley’s tragic creature looms throughout del Toro’s filmography, which is full of misunderstood monsters (notably the “Hellboy” films, “Pan’s Labyrinth” and Best Picture winner “The Shape of Water”). But Frankenstein is more than an inspiration: For del Toro, the monster has spiritual significance. 

“He has the same capacity to move me as a Pietà or any martyr in the inventory of saints of a church,” del Toro says in Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters. “Shelley created an amalgam of science, death, and eternal life….It touches on the fundamental questions of why we are where, why we exist. It’s a monster conceived as a universal symbol: It is man.”

And now, after decades of development, del Toro has made his own “Frankenstein,” which debuted on Netflix earlier this month. Like any creation, it bears the mark of its creator: in this case, del Toro’s sympathy for outsiders, his admiration of the grotesque and his dark Catholic imagination. Sometimes his ambitions get the best of him, and the film can feel overly long and hamfisted, more style than substance. But at its best, del Toro’s “Frankenstein” shocks new life and meaning into a familiar story.

You know the basics: Scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), obsessed with conquering death and proving his own brilliance, embarks on a blasphemous quest to reanimate dead flesh. He assembles a creature (a soulful, excellent Jacob Elordi) out of the remains of executed criminals and dead soldiers, and brings it to life with a torrent of electricity. But the creature is more child than man, and Victor quickly loses patience with it. His callous treatment of the creature teaches it cruelty, and horror and violence follow. As Victor laments: “In seeking life, I created death.”

Del Toro adopts a framing device from Shelley’s novel: We begin with an expeditionary crew finding Victor broken and bleeding in the Arctic, and he relates his story to the ship’s captain (Lars Mikkelsen, doing a lot with his eyes). Despite occupying the first hour and a half of the film’s runtime, Victor’s tale feels like del Toro on autopilot: immaculately designed, flashes of emotion and humor, but overall a bit lifeless. 

Victor, we learn, has a harsh, demanding father and a tender, sensual mother (del Toro loves an Oedipus complex). As an adult, Victor is brilliant, driven and completely indifferent to the rest of humanity, with the exception of his beloved younger brother William (Felix Kammerer). But even that relationship is poisoned when Victor finds a new obsession: William’s fiancée, the intelligent and ethereal Elizabeth (Mia Goth, who also plays Victor’s heavily shrouded mother). 

Compared to Dracula, his most famous monster movie counterpart, Frankenstein’s monster has always felt a little cold. They are both undead, of course, but Dracula is all about blood and desire, while Frankenstein movies are about science and hubris. Here, however, del Toro injects some passion into the proceedings: Victor’s angst, his lust, his sacreligious ambitions. Isaac is capable of great subtlety as an actor, but there’s no call for that here: He’s playing to the cheap seats, his Victor a thundering megalomaniac. Victor has always been the real monster of the story (in another blow to subtlety, his brother tells him this, almost verbatim), and del Toro really plays up that aspect of the character. But he’s so relentlessly awful that it’s hard to stay fully engaged in his story.

But the film finds a real spark of life when its focus shifts to the creature. Del Toro sympathizes more with the monster, which will not surprise anyone familiar with his work (although there is an element of scathing self-reflection in how he tells Victor’s story). But the film is also full of that spiritual reverence that del Toro describes in Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters. The creature is almost saintly: innocent, curious, gentle unless provoked—and even then, causes far less death and destruction than Shelley’s original. When Elizabeth encounters him, she is overcome with awe. Earlier in the film she tells Victor: “I’ve always searched for something more pure, marvelous.” This search led her to a convent, but she did not find what she was seeking there. In the monster, she finally glimpses something sublime.

It helps that the creature is embodied by Elordi, the Adonis of HBO’s “Euphoria,” rendered here as a towering statue of marble-pale stitched flesh. Elordi is spectacular, his performance deeply expressive and emotionally rich. The best stretch of the film is a tender and heartbreaking interlude where the creature observes a family of farmers from a distance, learning speech and the nature of human relationships. He eventually becomes something of a protector to the family, and bonds with the blind patriarch (David Bradley), before it all goes bad. 

In James Whale’s iconic 1931 version of “Frankenstein,” Boris Karloff imbued the monster with a poignant vulnerability. Elordi has the same gift: The creature looks grotesque, but you feel for him from the very first moment, and as he endures the cruelty of the world your heart breaks for him again and again.

Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is also striking for its indelible Catholic imagination. Victor’s blasphemy, for instance, is rendered with Catholic symbols and signifiers. As a child, he prays to a statue of St. Michael, the angel’s hand pointed upward to God. When he embarks on his obsessive quest, he sees a vision of “the Dark Angel,” a blood-red, flame-wreathed perversion of St. Michael. Its hand extends toward Victor, pointing him toward his new god. Later, while trying to learn more about Elizabeth, Victor pretends to be a priest when he sees her go into a confessional. The man can’t stop playing God, or at least God’s representatives.

If Victor is a crude parody of God the Father, the creature takes the role of God the Son. In the film, as in Shelley’s novel, the creature encounters John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and identifies with Adam. Here, del Toro plays with the concept of the New Adam. The creature has an ungodly virgin birth, heralded by the Dark Angel’s nightmarish Annunciation. He is brought (back) to life not on a flat operating table but an upright, cruciform apparatus, his arms outstretched. When Victor assembles the creature, he announces: “It is finished.” Again, it’s not subtle; but as a Catholic who enjoys del Toro’s style, I did find it evocative.

But the film’s most powerfully Catholic moment might be its ending. While largely preserving the tragic conclusion of Shelley’s novel, del Toro also chooses to end the story on a stunning, almost scandalous, note of forgiveness. It’s not an ending that will work for everyone (especially book purists), but I found it profoundly moving. 

“Choice,” Elizabeth tells Victor earlier in the film, “is the seat of the soul. The one gift God granted us.” What makes you human, the ending suggests, may be your ability to choose forgiveness, despite all of the wrong done to you. And perhaps only those who have suffered and made terrible, even monstrous, mistakes themselves can understand the true value of forgiveness. This is the great thesis of del Toro’s career, what all of his films are about in the end: that even monsters are capable of salvation.

“Frankenstein” is streaming now on Netflix.

John Dougherty is the director of mission and ministry at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School in Philadelphia, Pa.