Staid treatment can’t animate story of Frankenstein’s creation

When Haifaa al-Mansour directed her debut feature Wadjda in 2012, it represented a breakthrough on many levels — it was the first film to be shot entirely in the director’s native Saudi Arabia and the first to be directed by a Saudi woman in an era when women in that country could not vote or drive. It was also a delicately told and touching story that quietly but effectively advocated for the inevitability of changes to attitudes to women — something that is being borne out by the relaxation of some of the restrictions imposed on women in Saudi society.

So on paper you can see why Al-Mansour was attracted to the life story of the creator of arguably the most influential horror story in literary history, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Mary Shelley was the daughter of the proto-feminist firebrand and singlemindedly anti-establishment Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to her daughter. As a teenager she scandalised her father, William Godwin, when she eloped with 21-year-old married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom she had a tumultuous relationship until his death at the age of 29.

Unfortunately, what should be a celebration of a passionate trailblazer ends up here as an overlong, staid and stuffy period drama that does little more than scratch the surface of what drove Shelley to produce her magnificently complex and intriguing monster.

Elle Fanning, pictured right, plays Shelley as best she can but without the visual innovation and passion needed to propel the story, there’s not much even an actress of her talents can do to stop the yawns. Douglas Booth as Shelley certainly has the looks but his swings from charm to chauvinism and alcoholic hedonism are executed more by the book than with any real conviction.

Tom Sturridge produces a few convincingly moody moments as Shelley’s partner in crime Lord Byron, but overall there’s little here to draw you into any of the characters or their relationships and passions.

By the time we get to the last 30 minutes and the actual writing of the book and the struggle of its author to get it published, we’ve spent so much time in a dull replaying of interactions between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley that it’s hard to care. What should have been the focus of the tale seems like a tacked-on nod to audience expectation rather than a well-executed meeting of the story of Shelley and her most famous story.

For a film about the woman who gave us the classic story of reanimation, Al-Mansour’s biopic is disappointingly lifeless and an unfortunate misstep for a director who still has so much potential.

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