Film
Mary Shelley
- Director
- Haifaa al-Mansour
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 121 mins
Plenty of F-rated goodness here: a female director (Haifaa al-Mansour – the first female Saudi director, no less, making her English language debut), writer (Emma Jensen) and composer (Amelia Warner) serving up the true story of an extraordinary woman (played by Elle Fanning, with a supporting cast that includes Bristol’s very own Maisie Williams). And there’s certainly a strong feminist undercurrent to this re-telling of the story of how the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin hooked up with boho poet Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth) for much laudanum-fuelled debauchery, during which she bashed out one of the most influential novels in the English language (that’s Frankenstein, fact fans) while still a teenager.
The film nails the hypocrisy of the self-obsessed romantic poets and explores Mary’s struggles to be taken seriously by the male-dominated literary establishment. Alas, many critics found it all rather plodding and dreary, with risible dialogue and thin characterisation. “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,” was Variety‘s verdict.
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