I cued this movie up on Netflix with some trepidation. I like Guillermo Del Toro, both as a guy and film nerd (he's always great in interviews, including ones I've done with him as a film reporter) and as a filmmaker, because he knows how to make a movie.

Unfortunately, I haven't really liked any of his films since Pacific Rim, and that's only because it was more like a Michael Bay smash em up. His screen stories since (The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley) have had good and assured visuals but narratively and structurally have left me cold.

I had slightly higher hopes for his take on one of history's most iconic monsters because the essential plot laid down over two centuries ago by Mary Shelley would be pretty hard for a filmmaker as talented as he is to get wrong.

Thankfully, he hits all the right notes and adds just enough to make it his own. Oscar Isaac is Victor, who we first meet in the opening coda of a Dutch exploration ship trapped in the ice of the Arctic. While trying to dig themselves out, the no-nonsense captain and his overworked crew see an explosion in the distance and send out a search party to investigate.

They find Victor – shaggy, dishevelled and half conscious – bringing him back to the ship and nursing him back to health where he warns them of something out in the icy wastes stalking him, something that will kill them all if it catches up with him.

As they tend to him he tells his tale. He's a brilliant but acerbic scientist who was bought up by a cruel, taskmaster father (Charles Dance) who instilled a knowledge of medicine in him from an early age but failed to nurture him emotionally after the death of his beloved mother.

Victor grew up determined to arrest the final frontier in human medicine by conquering death. After he presents his findings to a gathering of prestigious medical college professors and the half corpse of a dead man starts to twitch and moan on the table, they want none of it, considering it a travesty against God.

Victor isn't afraid to tread on toes and to hell with tradition or seniority, but someone else is in the audience. Rich industrialist Harlander (Christoph Waltz) visits Frankenstein and gives him the offer of a lifetime; he'll fully fund his research in return for the vague promise of fulfilling the obligation at some point in the future.

Along with his architect younger brother Will, Victor sets about establishing his terrifying lab in a forbidding tower next to a windswept sea. After purloining the body parts he needs for his creature from war dead and hanged convicts, Victor throws the switch and as it must, the creature wakes up.

At first he thinks he's done it, but after chaining the creature (in the shape of Jacob Elordi) in the sodden basement of the tower and trying to get it to speak, Victor gets increasingly frustrated that all it ever says is his name.

But the creature gets a glimpse of human kindness is Will's winsome fiance Elizabeth (Mia Goth), who Victor also holds a candle for but who stays true to William. Without Victor knowing, she hears the creature and goes to see it, horrified to find a man chained up like an animal and challenging Victor about its treatment.

Victor eventually decides his experiment is a failure, pouring kerosene all over the place and intending to burn it to the ground with the monster inside. The explosion critically injures him and the creature narrowly escapes after breaking its chains.

As Victor's finishing his own tale to the Dutch ship's doctor and captain, the creature arrives, bursting into the room and (now fully verbal) telling its own story.

After it escaped the ruins of the tower it roamed the wilderness, eventually finding its way to a homestead where it hid away, watching the family who lived there from the shadows and learning about companionship, family and love.

When they leave in search of food, only the old blind grandfather left in the house, the creature gradually emerges, befriending the old man and learning once more that he isn't a monster but a human being.

When his new friend prompts him to search for the truth of his origins and he returns to the ruined laboratory, he figures out that he's actually a reanimated being from sewn together body parts. And after constantly withstanding injuries that heal immediately, he realises he can't die and will spend eternity alone.

So on the evening of Will and Elizabeth's wedding, the creature sneaks into the Frankenstein estate to confront Victor, demanding that he make him a companion like he is. Victor draws a gun, Elizabeth and Will both try to intercede, and it all ends badly.

The creature takes off and Victor gives chase, intending to destroy it once and for all, pursuing it all the way to the snowy wastes of the Arctic and the Dutch crew where we find him.

The story is sound owing to the source material, and the visual approach – from the wheeling camera to Isaac's wide eyed, manic enthusiasm – is grand, sweeping and operatic.

The only really low note is the design of the creature. The ragged, torn robes we first see it dressed in as it shambles across the snow, its face in shadow, make for a pretty powerful image, but the make-up design isn't as distinctive as James Whale and Boris Karloff made it in 1932. Even Kenneth Brannagh and Robert De Niro made him more interesting-looking in 1994.

The blue lines that mark damaged tissue from body parts that were spliced together makes sense narratively, but it's just a tall, pale guy with lines all over him and looks kind of dumb. If del Toro and his designers had come up with something like the bolts in the neck or the flat top of the classic Universal version it might have been just as iconic.

But it's good to see him make a story that finally works in plot as well as look. Because of his longstanding fascination with monsters, you can imagine it being more of a passion project than most of his other films, and he undoubtedly latched onto Shelley's themes of how Victor (and everyone like him – including us – that rejects difference in people) is the real monster.