Mary Shelley review: Intelligent, probing biopic with a strong feminist slant

Haifaa al-Mansour, 121 mins, starring: Elle Fanning, Maisie Williams, Douglas Booth, Joanne Froggatt, Stephen Dillane, Bel Powley

Elle Fanning doesn’t look much like Boris Karloff but Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Mary Shelley suggests that the Frankenstein author (played here by Fanning) had just as tough a time of it as the monster she so famously brought to life - and which was played by a bolt-necked Karloff in the Universal horror movies.

Shelley’s mother died when she was only a few days old - and the daughter blamed herself for the loss. The men in her life, first her father William Godwin (Stephen Dillane) and then the dashing romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth), were as cruel to her in their own ways as Dr Frankenstein was to his creation. Like the creature, Mary felt she was brought “into the world to be abandoned.”

Mary Shelley is an intelligent, probing, well-acted biopic with a strong feminist slant. Unfortunately, it is short on any of that electric charge that its heroine watches scientists use to animate the limbs of dead creatures. This is a film in serious need of galvanising. It serves up moments from the life of the young Mary as if by rote.

She is shown first as a teenager living in genteel poverty in London with her distinguished father, a writer and philosopher eking out a precarious existence as a bookseller. She has a mischievous younger stepsister, Claire (Bel Powley), and a stepmother (Joanne Froggatt) she can’t stand.

Young Mary has the urge to create (“there is something at work in my soul, which I don’t understand”) but is living in a patriarchal society in which women struggle for acceptance as artists or authors.

Enter the “beautiful” Percy Shelley (played by Booth as if he is the Romantic era’s answer to the Libertines’ Pete Doherty), whom she meets first in Scotland. They meet again in London and elope. Her father disowns her. She has moments of happiness but also suffers great hardship.

All the time, though, she is storing away experiences that she is able to draw on when she and Shelley are in Switzerland and their host Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) proposes they write ghost stories. Frankenstein is born. The book is published but at first Mary doesn’t get any credit for it.

Saudi director Al-Mansour’s previous feature, Wadjda, was a small-scale but wonderfully engaging tale about a 10-year-old girl’s quest to buy a bicycle. It had an urgency which Mary Shelley lacks. There are impressive elements here. Fanning gives a performance of a fragile but ferocious intensity as the single-minded heroine. Bel Powley is very lively as her sister.

Cinematographer David Ungaro and the production designers work wonders with candlelight and period design in evoking a Gothic look for the early 19th Century. The film has the same atmospheric visuals as the Henry Fuseli paintings of women suffering nightmares which are cited as an influence on Frankenstein.

Some of the casting is wayward. Tom Sturridge is far too callow to be remotely convincing as Lord Byron. Even if he does wear a fur coat and kisses Shelley on the lips, he doesn’t seem either mad, bad or particularly dangerous to know. The recreation of the world of Byron and Shelley is strangely insipid by comparison with how the same events were dramatised in Howard Brenton’s 1984 play, Bloody Poetry.

The episodic structure strains out much of the suspense. For all its craft and elegance, this account of the origins of Frankenstein never really comes to life.

Mary Shelley hits UK cinemas 6 July.