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This is a story set in the early colonial period of New England. It has the authenticity of a well-researched historical drama, up to and including dialogue delivered in a period accent and vocabulary (softened a bit so that it's easy to understand). Instead of drawing on historical events, though, it draws on historical folklore -- it's the story of witchcraft afflicting a family, such as might have been told at the time.

The characters are a very believable, ordinary family, with the sorts of tensions and problems you'd expect from people living a hard and substantially isolated life after being exiled from the local colonial town. They also have period Calvinist attitudes, and the storytelling doesn't present an outsider's view of this or offer a modern commentary, but instead it just displays these attitudes and tells a story from the characters' standpoint.

Their reliance on period folklore means that it doesn't strictly follow modern horror movie tropes, either. It has the slow build of a modern psychological horror/thriller as well as the standard formula where tragedies start from tragic flaws, but the traditions it's drawing on depend on a Calvinist's conception of flaws, and treat witchcraft as a horrible, well-understood occurrence rather than a shocking supernatural surprise. This story applies these perspectives.

It's very well done in terms of writing, acting, and other aspects of execution, so it might have cross-over appeal to fans of horror, folklore, or straight period drama from colonial America.

The story of Frankenstein has been told and retold repeatedly since Shelley's novel, and previous movie treatments have aimed variously for Gothic horror, action adventure, character study and psychological drama.

In this case, the plot of the movie is a riff on the 1931 Boris Karloff version and direct derivatives (assembling a human body from parts and animating them with lightning, police nemesis, hunchbacked assistant, remote castle), with a change of focus from the tragedy of the monster (also a primary theme of the novel), or even from the monster entirely, to an attempt at answering a central question about Dr. Frankenstein himself: "What was he thinking?" We are given the perspective of the assistant, designated as "Igor", with enough backstory to make him sympathetic and his choices comprehensible, and through him we are introduced to medical student Frankenstein, well-rendered as an otherwise decent person who is believably and dangerously manic and obsessive (rather than theatrically insane or cold-blooded and sociopathic). We follow Igor as he is drawn first by gratitude and loyalty, then friendship and compassion, to assist in a project that at first sounds dubious and gradually turns disastrous and horrible.

The movie will not be satisfying to an audience hoping for extended combat scenes featuring the monster, brooding character studies in dark motivations, or wide, cinematic views of lonely Gothic settings (most of it takes place in a repurposed urban warehouse), although it as brief and well-chosen examples of all of those things. Frankenstein himself lacks the usual wife/fiancé, and the only romantic angle is an association of Igor's that serves to frame the plot.

The story the movie actually chooses to tell is engaging and well done.

Any five to ten minute excerpt from this movie could easily lead a viewer to conclude that this is a well made horror or suspense thriller. The production values are high, the performances good, and so on.

The problem is that the parts of the film don't fit together. The sequence of action has the usual slow build and accelerating pace of any good thriller, but while the set-up is promising, and the events proceed logically enough as interesting and sympathetic characters are frightened, threatened or killed off, the reasons underlying the events remain obscure.

Hints and suggestive exposition are introduced, and then forgotten. There are explicit references to religious-themed horror fantasy, speculative science, and even a few elements of a possible conspiracy. An elaborate backstory is gradually revealed, and then abruptly dismissed. The conclusion doesn't really conclude anything: there's a decisive ending, but no resolution, no revelation, not even a clear idea of the probable consequences.

It's possible a re-edit could address these issues and make it a decent film. As it stands, though, it just doesn't work.