This movie's probably unlucky in getting me as its audience, given I'd researched and written a short bio of Mary as part of a recent season of an adaptation of "Frankenstein". Therefore I was uniquely placed to spot omissions, bad choices of emphasis and just-plain-getting-people-wrong. But even if I wasn't, I'm pretty convinced I'd still hate this.
Mary Shelley's early years with the poet and her eventual husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, are dramatic, romantic, intense and full of tumult. This is none of those things. It's perversely determined to present Mary as a sensible, polite, put-upon woman, not someone who makes wild choices throwing herself into a relationship that will be tumultous and incredibly strained. And there is no chemistry whatsoever between Elle Fanning playing Mary and the dully pretty Douglas Booth. This is a project that needs to be all-consuming-passion and instead is relentlessly, painfully logical about everything. There's no energy, no drive - maybe a little moment here and there with the delightfully languid Lord Byron played by Tom Sturridge - but all in all this is a complete failure both as biography and as an interesting drama. Big fat pass on this from me.
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