Guillermo del Toro

I live in a hype-proof bunker and knew nothing about La Bola Negra before I attended the screening. The film won the best director prize at Cannes, or perhaps the best directors prize, since Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi share the job. You might expect a film acclaimed for its direction to be well paced and confident of where it’s going – direction means steering, after all – but that doesn’t describe the film I saw. Raul Refree’s score, for instance, is not only intrusive but bewildering, churning through moods and instrumental combinations (horn and flute, solo piano tinkles, braying brass) faster than anything that develops on screen. La Bola Negra starts during the Spanish Civil War, with a village turning out to salute the Italian air force as it flies over.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac (Baron Victor Frankenstein) and Jacob Elordi (‘the creature’) and retells the basics of Mary Shelley’s story – man creates monster, man rejects monster, monster goes off on one – with high-camp sumptuousness. Del Toro’s spin is to include a redemptive arc, plus he throws in some invented characters. ‘The creature’, meanwhile, is portrayed with great sympathy, as a soulful, mistreated innocent. In other words, there’s no Boris Karloff lumbering around in that blazer a size too small with a bolt through the neck. It opens with a Danish expedition-ship stuck in the Arctic ice and the crew rescuing an injured Victor.

If you want to see Guillermo del Toro’s no-expense-spared adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein this Halloween, you’ll have to hope that you’re living in a major city with an arthouse cinema. That is because, as part of the Faustian deal that Netflix strikes with the filmmakers whom it gives blank checks to realize their dream projects, the pictures that they make get only the most token of cinematic releases before they are sent onto the streaming service, there to become part of the algorithm for all eternity.