X
- 2018
- PG-13
- IFC Films
- 2 h
- 2018
- PG-13
- IFC Films
- 2 h
Summary She will forever be remembered as the writer who gave the world Frankenstein. But the real life story of Mary Shelley—and the creation of her immortal monster—is nearly as fantastical as her fiction. Raised by a renowned philosopher father (Stephen Dillane) in 18th-century London, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Elle Fanning) is a teenage dr...
Directed By: Haifaa Al-Mansour
Written By: Emma Jensen
- 2018
- PG-13
- IFC Films
- 2 h
- 2018
- PG-13
- IFC Films
- 2 h
Mary Shelley
49
5.7
Where to Watch
Summary She will forever be remembered as the writer who gave the world Frankenstein. But the real life story of Mary Shelley—and the creation of her immortal monster—is nearly as fantastical as her fiction. Raised by a renowned philosopher father (Stephen Dillane) in 18th-century London, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Elle Fanning) is a teenage dr...
Directed By: Haifaa Al-Mansour
Written By: Emma Jensen
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 28 Critic Reviews
49
18% Positive
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
71% Mixed
20 Reviews
20 Reviews
11% Negative
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 28 Critic Reviews
49
18% Positive
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
71% Mixed
20 Reviews
20 Reviews
11% Negative
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
Mary Shelley is a luscious-looking spectacle, drenched in the colors and visceral sensations of nature, the sensuality of young lovers, the passionate disappointment of loss and betrayal. But above all it is a film about ideas that breaks out of the well-worn mold of period drama (partly, anyway) by reaching deeply into the mind of the extraordinary woman who wrote the Gothic evergreen Frankenstein.
A disappointingly straightforward, romance-driven take on a fascinating story of creation, but one that’s lifted by a superb central performance by Elle Fanning.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 29 User Ratings
5.7
45% Positive
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
34% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
21% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 29 User Ratings
5.7
45% Positive
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
34% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
21% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
I really enjoyed this film, partly because it does a very good job of re-creating one of my favorite periods in British Literature – that of the Romantic poets (Byron and Shelley in particular) – without being too serious and scholarly (and dull). It also provides an interesting take on how the novel “Frankenstein” came to be written. As an extra added treat, it also brings some insight into the origins of Bram Stoker’s Dracula via the publication of “Der Vampyr.” The film is reasonably accurate, is extremely well-made (acted, directed, etc.), and is just a lot of fun. Ella Fanning is particularly impressive since she gives a lively performance of a difficult role – she makes Mary Shelley a believable human being in the middle of a period movie and creates someone today’s audience can understand and sympathize with.
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for the life of me I do not understand how this movie did not score high with the critics. I can only guess that some were expecting to see a monster movie. LOL... this has been the best version of Mary's writing of her book. To be quite frank, I super loved this movie and it had me glued to the screen the whole time. It brought much more insight into her life and how the book came to be. I super highly recommend this movie.
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The film is somewhat amusing – especially Tom Sturridge, who turns Lord Byron into poetry’s version of Jack Sparrow – but immediately forgettable.
Even when Mary finally gets her due, the film badly fumbles the moment.
Impressively shot and suffused with a righteous feminist fire, the film is undercut by a confused and clunky script and a fundamental lack of thematic focus, turning an extraordinary story into didactic and disjointed melodrama.
This is clearly all fantastic material for a film, but the problems begin with the woeful miscasting of Elle Fanning as the title character, and continue from there.
A film desperately in need of an electric charge, Mary Shelley is simply another cinematic corpse on the table.
[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]
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I really wanted to hate it!
Watching Mary Shelley was a curious experience. I knew I should hate it, because, although it gets many of the facts right, it gets a massive amount wrong, and thematically, it's a mess. As an English academic by trade, it really should have irritated me no end. But for all that, whilst I most certainly didn't love it, nor did I hate it. In fact, I actually liked quite a bit of it.
Directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour and written by Emma Jensen (Al-Mansour is credited with "additional writing"), the film bills itself as the true story behind the composition of Mary Shelley's (Elle Fanning) Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). This is essentially false advertising; of the two hour run-time, the writing of the novel takes up roughly twenty minutes of the last half hour. Instead, the film is a fairly insipid love story, beginning shortly before the first meeting of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth) in 1812, and culminating in 1819, after the initial anonymous publication of Frankenstein.
As a love story, the film's main focus is, obviously, the ebb and flow of the relationship between Mary and Shelley. With this as the organising principle, many of the main events in those seven years are covered; Mary's stay in Scotland with William Baxter (Owen Richards), where she first met Shelley; her difficult relationship with her father, William Godwin (Stephen Dillane); Shelley's unexpected arrival in London at Godwin's invitation; the collapse of Shelley's marriage to Harriet Westbrook (Ciara Charteris); the antagonism between Mary and her stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont (Joanne Froggatt); Mary's attempts to escape the shadow cast by her deceased mother, Mary Wollstonecraft; her close friendship with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont (Bel Powley); the elopement of Mary, Claire, and Shelley, and their constant struggle with debt; Shelley's concepts of "free love"; the death of Mary and Shelley's first child; the summer of 1816 in Geneva, when she and Shelly stayed with Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge); Mary's friendship with Dr. John Polidori (Ben Hardy) and the tragedy concerning his short story, "The Vampyre: A Tale" (1819); and, ultimately, Mary's composition of Frankenstein.
Within this reasonably accurate framework, there are a huge number of omissions, inaccuracies, and unwelcome interpolations. For everything the film gets right, it gets so much more wrong. For example, although it correctly shows that Shelley was of the opinion that Mary and Thomas Hogg (Jack Hickey) should become lovers, it fails to acknowledge that Mary herself wasn't entirely opposed to the idea, and was actually good friends with Hogg, who is depicted in the film as a lech who tries to force himself on her. The film also gets it right that Shelley and Mary first expressed their love for one another at her mother's grave, but it shies away from what many scholars believe; that Mary lost her virginity to Shelley on or near the grave. Although the film correctly depicts many of the details of the summer of 1816, it neglects to show that Mary was taking large quantities of laudanum for pretty much the entire time she was in Geneva.
However, easily the biggest problem is the script. First of all, it tries to cover too much, and instead of saying a lot about a few events, it says little of interest about a lot of events. But its biggest flaw is that it reduces one of the greatest love affairs of all time to a series of ridiculous and repetitive petty squabbles. The film is at pains to impart how empyrean Mary is, presenting her as a character whose soul is infused with the poetry of an era. However, when depicting her squabbles with Shelley, she's reduced to little more than a cipher for her beliefs. They literally have the exact same argument about five times; it's all about his free love and failure to provide for Mary clashing with her protofeminism and political sensibility. Additionally, the attempt to link passages from Frankenstein to specific events in Mary's life via flashbacks, is horrendous; poorly conceived, and just as poorly executed.
However, for all that, I can't hate it. Al-Mansour directs confidently and competently. The period detail is excellent. Caroline Koener's costumes are well designed, Paki Smith's production design is impressively detailed, and David Ungaro's cinematography is suitably gritty. There are also some fine performances; Booth is pitch-perfect as a frustrated and free-thinking Shelley, and Ben Hardy is superb as Polidori, whose tragedy is unfortunately glossed over far too quickly (although Sturridge's insanely over-the-top Byron is so bad it's just awful).
Academics and those familiar with the events will almost universally hate it, whilst a more mainstream audience will find it boring. Personally, I didn't hate it. A very curious experience!
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A godd performance from Elle Fanning but this period drama falls realy flat, compared to the creativity and the life of Shelly her self
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A competent film that, unfortunately, shies away from the most radical, progressive, challenging, and interesting aspects of Shelley's life, contenting itself instead to portray her as a mostly conventional girl, caught up as a sort of victim of her acquaintances' unconventional practices and thereby suffering for her art. In this film, Shelley is mostly defined by her relationship to Percy, and the publication of her first and most famous novel is seen as the end of her story, rather than the beginning.
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Production Company
IFC Films,
HanWay Films,
British Film Institute (BFI),
Parallel Films,
Gidden Media,
Bord Scannán na hÉireann / The Irish Film Board,
Luxembourg Film Fund,
Head Gear Films,
Metrol Technology,
Juliette Films,
Ralfish Films
Release Date May 25, 2018
Duration 2 h
Rating PG-13
Tagline Her Greatest Love Inspired Her Darkest Creation
Awards
Women Film Critics Circle Awards
• 3 Nominations
ReFrame
• 1 Win & 1 Nomination
Barcelona-Sant Jordi International Film Festival
• 1 Win & 1 Nomination
