Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein asks what it 'means to be human'

“We can be monsters together.”

It’s a sweet, almost pleading line delivered by the creature — a combination of Jacob Elordi and hours of meticulously applied prosthetics — in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Monday night.

The words capture the filmmaker’s sympathies toward monsters as seen in such films as Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and, most recently, The Shape of Water. That one also bowed at the Venice and Toronto festivals in 2017, and while it didn’t win the People’s Choice here, it did provide TIFF audiences with the frisson of watching it in the Elgin Theatre, where a key scene was also shot.

Frankenstein is, appropriately, a lumbering, long-legged beast of a movie, clocking in at a solid two and a h