Mary Shel­ley

The sto­ry of Mary Shel­ley (né́e Mary Woll­stonecraft God­win) is ripe for the biopic treat­ment, con­tain­ing as it does young love, roman­tic poets, dis­grace, tragedy and events lead­ing up to the cre­ation of the almighty hor­ror para­ble, ​‘Franken­stein’ sub­ti­tled ​‘or, The Mod­ern Prometheus’. All of this took place in Eng­land of the ear­ly 1880s while Shel­ley was still a teenag­er. On paper, who bet­ter to bring this intense female strug­gle to life than Haifaa Al-Man­sour, the Sau­di Ara­bi­an direc­tor whose 2012 fea­ture debut, Wad­j­da, is so vivid with the spir­it of its plucky child subject.

There is enter­tain­ment to be derived from Mary Shel­ley, but per­haps not for the right rea­sons. Elle Fanning’s cen­tral per­for­mance adds need­ed weight, but all around her the tone is bizarre and the per­for­mances ham­my. Mary, her lover Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley (Dou­glas Booth) and her step­sis­ter, Claire Clair­mont (Bel Pow­ley), louche about drink­ing with Lord Byron (Tom Stur­ridge) at his manor. After they pull up in car­riages, Byron flings open his front door, snarls, ​“Shel­ley”, and comes strid­ing over. The new arrivals freeze. But the anger was a put on, and on reach­ing the group Byron dra­mat­i­cal­ly kiss­es Per­cy on the mouth. Flour­ish­es like this abound. Every­one is some­thing of a rake.

The sto­ry is so juicy that the film works in spite of itself, although the plinky-plonk three-note piano refrain that accom­pa­nies every scene becomes its own joke. Al-Man­sour and her screen­writ­ing part­ner, Emma Jensen, pump the dia­logue full of swoons, espe­cial­ly in the open­ing stretch in which a 16-year-old Mary is wooed by the 21-year-old author Per­cy, who sends drip­py love notes, and inspires mur­mur­ing about the ​“cur­dling of the blood and the quick­en­ing of the heart.”

A motif of Mary’s char­ac­ter is that she is defi­ant­ly inter­est­ed in pur­su­ing true feel­ing and does not mind if it costs her her rep­u­ta­tion. ​“I fear noth­ing except that your mean­ing­less words will scare me away from my desires,” she snaps at her dis­ap­prov­ing step­moth­er, short­ly before her father, scan­dalised by her union with the mar­ried Bysshe-Shel­ley, kicks them both out. A female char­ac­ter as inde­pen­dent as she is cre­ative as she is soul­ful is tan­ta­lis­ing. Fanning’s self-pos­sessed turn makes her a force to admire, as she squares up to men who would use her body, demean her mind or deny her soul.

Mary Shel­ley ends up being an oppor­tu­ni­ty to enjoy Fanning’s qual­i­ty Eng­lish accent. She is unques­tion­ably the star of every scene – half- present to her com­pan­ions and half look­ing inward at the mon­strous feel­ings that will even­tu­al­ly become ​‘Franken­stein’. Her pen­sive watch­ful­ness also dou­bles as a baf­fled com­men­tary on the oth­er per­for­mances. Bel Pow­ley (won­der­ful in The Diary of a Teenage Girl) is over-styled, while Dou­glas Booth is at least 75 per cent pout.

The film is grat­i­fy­ing­ly on point with its gen­der pol­i­tics and styled to per­fec­tion, with Car­o­line Koener’s cos­tumes offer­ing a carousel of visu­al plea­sures. But unlike Shelley’s famous mon­ster, the dis­parate parts Al-Man­sour has assem­bled here do not move as one.