Elle Fanning (The Beguiled) stars in this highly anticipated and scintillating biopic of the Frankenstein author, chronicling her tempestuous marriage to dissolute poet Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth, Loving Vincent) and the fateful night that inspired her most famous creation.
Mary Wollstonecraft (Fanning) is a bookish teenager of humble means when she meets Percy Shelley (Booth) who, though only 21, is already a celebrated young poet and a shameless womaniser with one collapsing marriage under his belt.
Defying her beloved but disapproving father, Mary absconds with Percy in an affair that scandalises polite society. Mary seeks "unconventional approaches to living" and finds them in spades with her debt-ridden, bon-vivant scribe. Yet Percy believes in Mary and, when tragedy strikes, he whisks her away to Lord Byron’s chateau (Tom Sturridge, Song to Song), where she confronts her personal demons and composes one of the most influential horror novels of all-time. This sumptuous and intoxicating film comes from Australian screenwriter Emma Jensen and director Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda), and co-stars Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) and Bel Powley (The Diary of a Teenage Girl).
