Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Mary Shelley Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson June 3, 2020

In 2012 Haifaa al-Mansour became the first female director in her native Saudi Arabia to make a major feature. Her debut Wadjda was inspired by the movies of the Italian Neo-Realists and also the work of Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi. It tells the simple and compelling story of a 12-year-old girl who hopes to earn enough money to buy a bike and ride with her male counterparts. Wadjda was an international breakthrough that caught the attention of several producers who sent her Emma Jensen's script about another strong female protagonist, author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley. Al-Mansour envisioned a biopic set in the 19th century which is also centers on feminine assertiveness in a chauvinist world. She chose Elle Fanning to play the title role in Mary Shelley she's about the same age (16) as the novelist was when she turned to writing and because Fanning displays the kind of plucky qualities that al-Mansour would want to reach her intended demographic: female teens and aspiring feminists. While several varied cinematic adaptations and unofficial sequels have spun from Shelley's novel, Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (first published anonymously in 1818), no picture has been produced that's devoted to a period in her life.

Mary Shelley takes places in the UK over a five-year span beginning with Mary (Elle Fanning) narrating prose in her diary while sitting in a local cemetery where her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, rests. Wollstonecraft penned the famous feminist treatise The Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 and served as primal inspiration to her adoring daughter, Mary. The mum lived for only eleven days after giving birth to Mary, who lives with her poet/philosopher father, William Godwin (Stephen Dillane). Mr. Goodwin runs a book shop and is now married to Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin (Joanne Froggatt), who doesn't get along with her stepdaughter. The two Marys are strong-willed and the younger kin feels that her stepmother is too overbearing. Young Mary yearns to get out of London so she elopes with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth, looking like a young James Franco), whom she met at a dinner, to Ireland. (The couple also eloped to Italy, something the film doesn't show.) The problem is Percy is still married to Harriet Shelley (Ciara Charteris), who carries their female infant, so he starts making child-support payments. Mary's spunky stepsister Claire (Bel Powley) also wants to flee London so she fakes that she has a deadly disease, prompting Mary to return so she can take Claire with her back to Percy's place. While Mary is in love and will later marry Percy, she has to get used to her beau's unorthodox ideas about free love and polygamous relationships.

Two literate lovers.

Mary Shelley sufficiently but a bit too conventionally shows the milieu, period figures, lab experiments, and magic shows that inspired the teenage Shelley to write Frankenstein. Al-Mansour devotes only the third act to the fateful summer of 1816 where Mary, Percy, and Claire visit Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) at his Swiss chateau near Lake Geneva. Byron challenges his guests at a soirée he hosts to enter in a competition for writing the best ghost story. The amicable John William Polidori (Ben Hardy), who becomes cozy with Mary during her stay, lives with his Lordship and later goes on to write the short story, "The Vampyre." Ken Russell's Gothic (1986) covers much of the same terrain at Lord Byron's over an hour and a half and is easily the more stylistically ambitious of the two films. But al-Mansour's Mary Shelley is the more clearly told of the two of spite of sometimes being a slow burn. Al-Mansour's coda and epilogue demonstrates the sheer difficulty that a very young woman had in getting her first manuscript published.

Mary Shelley Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

To commemorate the bicentennial publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Shout! Factory and IFC Films released Mary Shelley in a Blu-ray only standard edition, which still comes encased in a slipcover. Al-Mansour's second feature appears in its original exhibition ratio of 2.40:1 on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-50. There are no source flaws, compressional artifacts, or crush issues. I didn't see Mary Shelley during its festival run and very limited theatrical release so I can't comment on how color schemes on the DCI prints compare to this transfer but some reviewers in the US and abroad have remarked about them. The movie was shot in Ireland and Donald Clarke of The Irish Times noticed how cinematographer David Ungaro "shoots it all with murky, oily grace." The scenes set in the cemetery (Screenshot #s 1, 15, & 18) have a dark brown, emerald green, and gray look to them. Kent Turner of the School Library Journal observed how the picture overall has a "deep blue and green color palette." Interiors are quite dark with candles and kerosene lamps providing ambient light. You'll spot the Vermeer-like lighting in the shot (#14) of Mary of looking down near a window. While the film is set at least partially in the summer, there are a lot of autumnal leaves. The red velvet curtains and beautiful green wallpaper stand out in the Shelley bedroom (#4). While the image can often look dreary, Shout! has competently handled transferring the film to Blu-ray. Shout! has encoded the movie at a mean video bitrate of 31999 kbps

Shout! provides twelve scene selections for the two-hour feature.

Mary Shelley Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround mix (3132 kbps, 24-bit) and a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo downsample (1603 kbps, 24-bit). The lossless 5.1 has been given a very healthy bitrate and delivers a balanced sonic presentation across all speakers. Dialogue is intelligibly delivered by the American and British cast. Door openings/closings, horse gallops, and other f/x are spread to the rear channels. In the film, Mr. Godwin encourages Mary to "find her voice" as a writer. Composer Amelia Warner also took the same approach in writing her score. She employs a soprano soloist, followed by additional female vocalists who echo the wordless voices in counterpoint. It reminds me of Jocelyn Pook's writing for soloists in her score to The Merchant of Venice (2004). Warner incorporates a moderately-sized orchestra along with synths and rhythmic bass. It's a very good score amplified by the 5.1 mix on this disc.

Shout! supplies optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

Mary Shelley Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Mary Shelley: Behind the Scenes (23:20, 1080p) - Interviews with actors Bel Powley, Ben Hardy, Elle Fanning, Tom Sturridge, and Douglas Booth. We also hear from co-producers Alan Moloney and Amy Baer (interviewed together) as well as director Haifaa Al-Mansour. The cast and crew discuss Mary Shelley's life and the roles they played in the production. There's minimal B-roll footage. In English, not subtitled.

• Theatrical Trailer (2:03, 1080p) - a post-festival trailer for Mary Shelley with critics' accolades that's presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen with DTS-HD MA 2.0 Stereo.

• Bonus Previews - trailers for The Female Brain (2:14, 1080p), A Kid Like Jake (2:29, 1080p), and The 12th Man (1:37, 1080p). These load consecutively after the disc is inserted and aren't accessible through the main menu. While the user can skip between trailers, fast-forwarding within one isn't allowed.

Mary Shelley Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Mary Shelley is a pretty narrowly focused biopic that does a solid job of dramatizing the major characters, milieu, and social forces that inspired a brilliant young woman to write a sci-fi masterwork. I felt that I learned more about her than I did from Russell's Gothic, which I also recommend and has a tighter focus on literary archetypes beside Shelley. I'm also looking forward to viewing Ivan Passer's Haunted Summer (1988) and Gonzalo Suárez's Rowing with the Wind (1988), each of which have their own versions of the goings-on at Lord Byron's in the summer of 1816. Shout! Factory delivers a terrific transfer and an excellent lossless audio presentation. I wanted a commentary track from Haifaa al-Mansour but the EPK featurette gives a decent look at the movie's principals. For fans of Elle Fanning and Douglas Booth, Mary Shelley comes HEARTILY RECOMMENDED.