From the new del Toro film one gets the sense that he has been waiting a good while for the chance to show off his new horrors to the lads and say: look what a monster I've got, and what a character!

The critics leave the auditorium deep in thought. On the one hand, sound handmade workmanship in the old style; might the horror not lie precisely in all this beauty being free of any digital footprint? On the other, some find there is rather too much feeling for a story about an electrical monster. But what matters to us, who are critics not for a second but plain Soviet viewers? That a man was not afraid to remake a classic, to let a little fresh air into a stuffy railway compartment without glancing round at the conductress.

And so before us is a story not of a demiurge and his mistake, but of two solitudes who met and lit a fire by the roadside. And the fire has no wish to blaze up. That's the whole of it. That's the whole conversation. They found each other by chance in this world, though, as in the finest Brazilian serial, far too late.

The form may be old. But the gaze! Sheer novelty, gleaming like a Zhiguli in the garage of an accountant from Tolyatti. The monster is no longer a pretext for a hunt, though not yet a sweet little creature from the Red Book either; rather a pretext for wondering who, in all this vaudeville, is the most frightening of all.

The drama is good, Victorian, like a baked pigeon; the philosophy is no worse than in a lecture hall for the whole year group, and the aesthetics are, as I keep saying, lovely, you can't even smell death here! It has all come together like the contents of an Auchan trolley after payday. There is something superfluous too: some tinned artichokes, a chestnut paste, but you put those in yourselves.

The collective film scholar complains that the moral is seeping out of the pie, that the baking tin is a bit tight. To my mind, nonsense; yes, it is slightly overthought, but it isn't as if one had to sit five hours in the theatre.

On the whole, Frankenstein is a sturdy fellow, the film is atmospheric, as they say in the cinema foyer, and a little sad. But this is no Tim Burton; here grown-ups are talking. About the subjects that are forever put off until the thunder goes craaaaaack ⚡️

And in one scene it is positively: you begot me, you crucify me