I finally saw Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which is streaming on Netflix after a brief theatrical release. And I was astounded at what a mess it is. There’s an occasional gleam of beauty and liveliness in this inert mass of scenes, which promises a more faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s original novel. But otherwise the film itself is like the unholy creation most people imagine when they think of Frankenstein’s monster — galvanized dead matter, crudely stitched and bolted together. It’s all inherently pathetic and repulsive.

Which is ironic, given the beauteous “monster” at the center of del Toro’s adaptation, played by ultrahandsome heartthrob Jacob Elordi. Once again, we’ve got a powerful monster of classic horror reenvisioned onscreen as somebody’s dreamy boyfriend. He resembles a seven-foot-tall blue-marble statue, with a certain delineation of muscles that recalls old anatomical drawings all of which only further eroticize this dreamboat. After his shocking birth, depicted as something like a newborn baby agog at the world, we’ve got the Creature as sensitive emo guy tenderly petting mice and gazing with wonder at the sky. This portrayal is all part of del Toro’s identification with and idolization of the Creature, of whom he says, “That is my Jesus. That is my patron saint.”

His Frankenstein has been heralded by mixed reviews, though some of them ecstatically proclaim, “It’s the film del Toro was born to make!” Which is just repeating what del Toro has been telling interviewers for years now, letting everyone know that since early childhood, he’s been obsessed by Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus as well as the legendary 1931 James Whale adaptation which first brought us the iconic flat-topped and neck-bolted monster played famously by Boris Karloff.

And so successfully has this film been sold to us as a must-see epic conveniently available on Netflix that masses of people are apparently watching it. Del Toro fans, of course, regard every film he makes as further proof of his genius, so there’s no use arguing with them. But it seems a shame, in an era when fewer and fewer people read even the most influential landmark literary works, that so many will go to their graves believing in this film as a great adaptation of Shelley’s novel.

Del Toro’s adaptation sticks closely enough to Shelley’s unusual structure that, at first — if you know the book — you might be fooled into thinking he’s determined to make a film that takes it seriously. Shelley’s Frankenstein is comprised of three narratives arranged like nesting-dolls, one inside the other. The outermost ring is the narrative of Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen), an obsessed Danish explorer whose ship is landlocked in snow and ice. He’s deserted his family and is risking his life and that of his crew in order to discover a route to the North Pole.

The second ring is the story of Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), another obsessed “Prometheus” figure determined to bring the light of greatly increased knowledge to humanity by discovering the riddle of how to raise life out of dead matter. And the central story is that of Frankenstein’s Creature, whose tale of harsh abandonment by his creator-father and painful self-education among a cruel humanity changes the reader’s perception of both of the previous narrators.

As we shoot through these rings in Shelley’s novel — Captain, Dr Frankenstein, Creature, Dr Frankenstein, Captain — we come out the other side no longer enthralled by the two men’s quests. And, in the end, they, too, are persuaded at last of the dark egoism of their obsessions. Victor Frankenstein finally recognizes his own overwhelming culpability and the Captain is fully persuaded to give up his mad endeavor, spare his men, and go home to his family.

Keep in mind that Shelley was raised in the world of “great men” after her mother, the pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after giving birth to her. Her father was philosopher William Godwin, and for many years a stream of male acolytes beat a path to his door. They included the poet Percy Shelley, who became teenage Mary’s great love and eventual husband. And famously she first dreamt up her horror story in 1816 during an extended stay in the Swiss mountain getaway of mad-bad-and-incredibly-famous poet Lord Byron. The tale of Dr Frankenstein was Shelley’s contribution to a playful “ghost story” competition with three established authors — Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, whose tale “The Vampyre” is credited as the first modern vampire story.

At that time, the damage these three men had done to the many women and children in their lives had yet to pile up to the appalling level that would make Mary’s life hell. But she seemed to intuit the possibility of relentless family-destroying tragedy early on. Among other things, the novel Frankenstein emerged as a vision of the nightmare of motherless birth, entirely male-created progeny, and the sorry fate of suffering, badly educated offspring left to the tender mercies of “Promethean” men.

Del Toro preserves the bare bones of Shelley’s plot but changes so much else, bringing in so many other preoccupations of his own, that a baggy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink structure weighs his film down. Perhaps most disastrously, del Toro’s Creature is simply too beautiful. And by making him beautiful, it removes the instinctive revulsion felt by every human who encounters it. Shelley’s Creature is described as dead matter up and moving around — a zombie of sorts. She emphasized the “straight black lips,” the shriveled dun-colored skin, the flat stare of the yellow eyes that first make Victor Frankenstein recoil from his creation.

But here del Toro wants to emphasize the beauty and purity of the Creature as a work of art. Instead, Victor Frankenstein rejects him because — um — apparently, the Creature’s not smart enough? Not good at his lessons. Can’t seem to learn words beyond the first one he speaks, the parental name “Victor.”

Here Victor is reenacting the nasty but familiar scenes of his own motherless childhood, when he was whipped across the face for giving a wrong answer to a question posed by his father (Charles Dance), an eminent doctor. For Baron Frankenstein, his son is merely a reflection of himself and therefore must live up to his own self-image. And as much as Victor comes to hate his father, he helplessly absorbs the Baron’s arrogance, egoism, and inability to parent with any empathy.

As Victor, poor Oscar Isaac strides around sticking out his strangely enormous chin in a state of lunatic aggression toward everyone and everything, a weird one-note performance meant to convey from the beginning what gets directly stated much later in the narrative: “You’re the real monster.”

But also missing is the novel’s swift and sure “bride of Frankenstein” plotline, later adapted in 1935 in very different form as James Whale’s even more iconic sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. In the book, after Victor Frankenstein flees his Creature in a state of irrational terror, he returns home and takes up the domestic life he’d been neglecting, finally agreeing to give up his Promethean pursuits and marry his fiancée, Elizabeth. The Creature soon tracks him down and demands that Victor make a female companion for him so at least he won’t be the only one of his kind, condemned to total isolation and rejection. Under duress, Victor actually makes the “bride,” but just at the point of animating her, thinks about the possibility that the creatures might procreate. He then tears the female creature to pieces.

Witnessing this, the Creature says ominously to Frankenstein, “I will be with you on your wedding night.” With typical egocentricity, Victor thinks the vengeful Creature means to kill him. But of course, it’s Elizabeth who’s the intended victim. The Creature then goes on a lineage-destroying rampage, laying waste to the House of Frankenstein so that Victor will be made into an isolated outcast like himself.

Del Toro opts for much messier plotting. For some reason, he’s updated the period from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to 1857, the Victorian Era, and his Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is now the fiancée of Victor’s grown brother, William (Felix Kammerer), though Victor covets her. She’s an amateur biologist particularly fascinated by insects, who wears a series of sumptuous Victorian gowns and headdresses that make her look like the butterflies she studies. She’s also a lonely enigma, unhappy with her place in the world, who responds immediately and compassionately to Victor’s Creature.

Elizabeth’s uncle Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) is an arms dealer profiting mightily from the Crimean War who offers to bankroll Victor’s life-creating experiments. It’s eventually revealed that Henrich has syphilis, an incurable scourge of that time guaranteeing the sufferer a horrifically painful, brain-rotting decline and death. He wants Victor to grant him a kind of immortality by joining his own body with that of the Creature.

And I guess all those additions to the plot could have been interesting — the Crimean War, arms dealing, amateur biology and syphilis, etc. But they’re also distracting as hell. In fact, del Toro’s Frankenstein is a mass of accumulated distractions in every respect. Even the richly colored production design, meant to be epic and gorgeous, instead demands attention, whether we like it or not.

It must be noted that there are CGI effects in this film that are truly atrocious, an offense to the eye. Probably the worst is a pack of wolves, moving like they were computer-generated back in the mid-1990s, that attack the old Blind Man (David Bradley) — who befriends and helps educate the Creature for a while — in a woodsy cottage.

Why is there a pack of wolves rampaging through Frankenstein killing off important characters? I have no idea. Though it does give the increasingly philosophical Creature his thought for the day:

The hunter did not hate the wolf. The wolf did not hate the sheep. But violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of the world. It would hunt you and kill you just for being who you are.

In the end, we’re left with little more than del Toro’s all-encompassing infatuation with the Creature, for whom he’s even invented X-Men-like super powers (self-healing, superhuman strength) that grant him an immortality the novel’s creature definitely doesn’t have. In the finale, del Toro’s Creature reaches out to the hopeful dawn, having been urged by his repentant dad, Victor, to live, live, live to the fullest his life of icy exile. It’s a weird teen-dream happy ending — all alone at last to appreciate his own greatness and recite his smattering of philosophical knowledge, far from an ungrateful humanity!

To say the least, it’s nothing Shelley would ever, ever, ever have thought of as a fit ending to any variation of her hellish tale. But at least del Toro, by making an auteurist extravaganza that abandons its source material with glee, can walk free of his Frankenstein obsession at long last.