Mary Shelley review – Elle Fanning plays the innocent while making a monster

Saudi director Haifaa Al-Mansour captures the pathos and pity of the Frankenstein story while eliciting an insouciant and poised performance from her starHaifaa Al-Mansour is the Saudi Arabian film-maker whose 2012 debut feature Wadjda was the first to be shot entirely in her home country and so far the only Saudi picture to be directed by a woman.

So she is an interesting choice to take on this script from first-time screenwriter Emma Jensen, about the life of Mary Shelley, author of the 1818 classic Frankenstein, famously arrived at after a kind of competition, or dare, between Mary, her soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, as to who could create the scariest tale.Mary was a woman working in a man’s world, creating an entirely new genre of writing and moreover one in a brutal and audacious and stereotypically male style.

It was a thrilling story that tackled the themes of abandonment,

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