Jacob Elordi in the Oscars fast lane after Frankenstein premiere at Venice

This year’s Venice Film Festival finally subsided, as always, with sprays of fireworks, spritz cocktails and a fistful of Lion awards for films ranging from a long Hungarian drama about the study of trees to a horrific drama set among an emergency response team in Gaza.

It also established that Jacob Elordi, who plays the tragic monster in Guillermo del Toro’s vast, extravagant and arguably indulgent adaptation of Frankenstein, is in the fast lane to next year’s Oscars. If he wasn’t in the big league before, he certainly is now.

First, the Australian contender. Critics were divided by the “bombastic” Frankenstein, but Elordi’s performance as the lonely monster, who pursues his vain, myopic creator Dr Frankenstein across the Earth to demand he make him a companion, was identified by many as the film’s saving grace.

As in the novel, the story is told by Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) to his rescuer; Del Toro’s key twist is to have the creature interrupt him, then resume the story – but from his own monstrous, persecuted point of view. At that point, says Vulture, “the movie roars to life … Elordi makes the creature’s awakening, his growing curiosity and hurt, feel fresh, vital, new.” Indiewire agreed, saying that “he becomes the soul of a movie that may not have had one without him.”

Frankenstein was one of three Netflix films in the 21-strong Venice competition, but the festival’s Golden Lion was destined for a very different kind of American film.

Jim Jarmusch’s sly little sliver of life, cumbersomely titled Father Mother Sister Brother, consisted of three portraits of families failing – in fact, not really trying – to bridge the gulf of understanding between parents and their adult children.

In the first chapter, Tom Waits plays a scallywag dad who is gently bleeding his children for money, pretending to be poor. Move to the second chapter and Cate Blanchett, a longtime friend of Jarmusch’s, is almost unrecognisable as a prim museum officer, taking tea with her mother (Charlotte Rampling) and pink-haired, feckless sister (Vicky Krieps, with her German accent faint but intact; Jarmusch clearly wasn’t bothered). In the last chapter, Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore are twins clearing their dead hippy parents’ Paris apartment, realising how little they knew about them.

Jarmusch is an iconic presence at festivals, but the win for what even he calls “our quiet film” came as a surprise.

Before the ceremony, almost anyone on the Lido would have predicted that The Voice of Hind Rajab, a harrowing real-life story of a little girl in Gaza who was trapped for hours in a bombed car with the bodies of her dead family, simply could not be passed over for something merely imaginary.

Nothing about Hind Rajab is imaginary. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania cast Palestinian actors and used the real child’s voice, recorded in her calls to Red Crescent, with her mother’s blessing.

Support for the project came from a clutch of celebrity producers, including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix and his partner Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuaron and British director Jonathan Glazer, who made the stunning Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest.

Public enthusiasm for the film was so great that the standing ovation at the premiere went on for a record 23 minutes – and would have lasted longer if the ushers had not started chivvying the audience out.

The Venice jury, chaired by American director Alexander Payne (Nebraska, The Holdovers) ultimately awarded it the Grand Jury Prize, essentially second place. This was possibly a judicious decision to avoid accusations of turning the Golden Lion into a political prize, but the decision has already been damned as cowardly by Italy’s remaining left-leaning media and by festivalgoers, many of whom joined a demonstration against the war during the festival’s first weekend.

Even the festival organisation has shown its support by playing a live link at the end of the awards with the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who asked the cinema community to play its part in creating “a different narrative”.

Strong audience responses are not usual in Venice; most films end with a polite clap and hasty exit. Another exception to that norm – for entirely different reasons - was Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi’s Silent Friend, a remarkable swirl of three stories set in different eras but within the same university arboretum in Germany.

One of the human performers – Luna Wedler, playing the first woman permitted to enrol in the university’s science faculty – won the festival’s Marcello Mastroianni prize as best young actor. It was well-deserved, but audiences at the film’s screenings reached their clapping peak when a page of credits for the plants shown in the film, listed under their Latin names, succeeded the actors. The crowd roared. This is surely a festival first.

Another charmer at the festival was undoubtedly Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, a ’70s-set thriller about a mad-as-hell small investor who kidnaps his mortgage broker. Cheers rang out throughout the credits; perhaps people just hate banks. They are also relatively ready to embrace American films. The mood was high and there were rolling cheers for the various characters throughout the credits: people really do hate banks.

They are not, however, shy about American mainstream cinema. The festival’s best director award went to Ben Safdie for The Smashing Machine, in which The Rock plays an MMA professional.

As well as Frankenstein, Netflix entered Kathryn Bigelow’s apocalyptic thriller A House of Dynamite and the George Clooney-starrer, Jay Kelly. Bigelow’s story of a missile strike that could trigger the war to end all wars is what we expect from her: intensity, rapid cutting, guns, uniforms and nuggets of personal drama thrown up among blasts of action.

Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly is an ensemble piece about a celebrity, his entourage and fraying family, full of bone-dry observations so precise that we feel queasily certain they are drawn straight from life.

Netflix was not the only studio looking to set out its Oscar stall, either. Amazon brought Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, with Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield as academics caught in the web of a student’s charge of sexual assault; Roberts’s frosty philosophy professor was widely tipped for awards consideration.

Focus Features had Bugonia, the fourth collaboration between Greek “Weird Wave” director Yorgos Lanthimos and actor/producer Emma Stone, which moved giddily from a kidnap heist story to sci-fi madness. It was thrilling, risky, brilliant.

The problem with Venice – the problem with any festival – is that there are hundreds of films; it is impossible to get more than a taste. That said, this was generally agreed to have been a strong year. It was also fun.

Cannes is unquestionably the world’s premier film festival, but it is increasingly focused on business; Venice has an enduring commitment to old-school glamour, including the trashy kind.

There is always a sprinkling of decorative women ambling around in spangled decollete gowns and feathered head-dresses at 9am. You can rely on clocking a look-at-that plastic-surgery showpiece on every block.

Even ordinary punters turn up in outfits entirely made of glitter, presumably after raiding the Christmas decoration box. And I reserve a special bouquet for the fat bloke who arrived each day with his bushy topknot entwined with a different set of small stuffed toys; by Saturday, he was crowned with half a zoo.

This is the kind of thing that makes a festival actually festive, not just a film program. Long may they hang around the ice-cream shops, hoping to be noticed. Pay attention, topknot guy: you never know your luck.

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