Oh, the horror

Mary Shelley’s story retold with clumsy characters

This year is the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a fact unremarked upon by the Frank character in Hotel Transylvania 3. Slightly more on-the-nose is Mary Shelley, a drab, paint-bynumbers telling of how the writer, not yet 20, came to pen one of the seminal science fiction works.

Elle Fanning stars as the bookish Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, growing up with an indulgent dad (“Find your own voice!”), a close sister and an evil stepmom. Percy Shelley is helpfully described by a bystander in precisely 15 words: “A radical poet who thinks poetry should reform society and so is often in trouble.” He breathes his middle name at 16-year-old Mary — “Bysshhhhe” — she blushes mightily, and the romance is off and running.

Mary Shelley was directed by the celebrated Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al-mansour, who cowrote the script with Australia’s Emma Jensen. It is Jensen’s first screenplay and Al-mansour’s first English-language feature, which may go some way toward explaining why the dialogue is so tinny and the staging so clumsy. Secondary characters — such as Shelley’s first wife — arrive exactly when required, deliver the perfect exposition and vanish.

Fanning is fantastic, reaching for and finding the depths of sadness, betrayal and rage that Shelley must have experienced in losing her first-born, loving the inconstant Percy and ultimately being forced to publish her greatest work anonymously, under an introduction that suggested her husband wrote it.

And the rest of the cast ranges from passable to pathetic. As Percy, Douglas Booth looks to be continually auditioning for a remake of Twilight. Tom Sturridge as Lord Byron arrives looking like a coked-up grizzly bear, and makes a strong case that the famous libertine died from acute overacting.

The costumes and sets are pretty and Gothic as required, but the totality of the film feels like a collection of parts stolen from better period dramas.