Mary Shelley
IFC Films | Release Date: May 25, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
49
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 28 Critic Reviews
Positive:
5
Mixed:
20
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
40
Arizona RepublicBarbara VanDenburghJun 7, 2018
It’s befuddling that such a barrier-breaking filmmaker would make a biopic about a woman who shares similar daring qualities that’s so … ordinary. To make boring the revelries of 19th century literati is no mean feat, but it is Mary Shelley's chief accomplishment. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenJun 20, 2018
As a filmed drama, Mary Shelley is sorely in need of a jolt of electricity similar to the one that reanimated Frankenstein’s monster in the author’s novel. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrMay 30, 2018
If Mary Shelley disappoints, it’s only because al-Mansour sticks to the tried and true bones of the bio-pic genre and plays it stylistically safe. Maybe the filmmaker hopes to prove her skill with a big-budget period piece; if so, she easily succeeds. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperMay 31, 2018
Even when Mary finally gets her due, the film badly fumbles the moment. Read full review
50
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerJun 1, 2018
What is missing here is any real sense of what it must have been like for two great writers to be living together, especially in that era, with its push-pull of progressivism and parochialism. This is a movie about fireworks where nothing ignites. Read full review
40
CineVueChristopher Machell
Mary Shelley is a film at relentless pains to tell us how poetic and ethereal its heroine is, but without remotely grasping the political and philosophical underpinnings of her work. Read full review
60
EmpireDan JolinJul 9, 2018
A disappointingly straightforward, romance-driven take on a fascinating story of creation, but one that’s lifted by a superb central performance by Elle Fanning. Read full review
58
IGNWitney SeiboldMay 24, 2018
Mary Shelley's fascinating life story is told to contain a few brief glimpses of modern insight, but ultimately weakens under its over-use of conventional, romantic storytelling tropes. Read full review
50
IndieWireKate Erbland
For a film that chronicles the rise of a creator obsessed with reanimating the dead, Mary Shelley is utterly lifeless. It contains a sparkling and startlingly raw performance by Elle Fanning, but Haifaa Al-Mansour’s disappointing followup to her remarkable “Wadjda” doesn’t push beyond paint-by-numbers biopic posturing Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesKatie WalshMay 24, 2018
The film celebrates Mary Shelley for the trailblazing woman that she is, but hews far too close to convention to truly represent her life. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreMay 22, 2018
Mary Shelley is in essence “Becoming Frankenstein,” the story of how a British teen had the education, talent, life experience and literary ambitions thanks to the salon she was a part of, to create one of the seminal novels in the history of horror. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)Emily YoshidaApr 20, 2018
This is clearly all fantastic material for a film, but the problems begin with the woeful miscasting of Elle Fanning as the title character, and continue from there. Read full review
50
ObserverRex ReedMay 29, 2018
The result is respectable, but dull and tedious. Only half a loaf is not a three-course meal. Read full review
38
RogerEbert.comSusan WloszczynaMay 25, 2018
Misguided effort to once more stage the fateful stormy summer night at Lord Byron’s Lake Geneva villa in 1816 that would give birth to a tale that continues to spark our imaginations today. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJun 6, 2018
From a narrative feature, we want drama and illumination, the truths that go beyond the plain facts. That’s where Mary Shelley comes up a bit short. It’s never less than competent and intelligent, and here and there it’s better than that. Read full review
70
Screen DailyAllan Hunter
Mary Shelley is ultimately the story of a woman finding her own voice and asserting her independence and that will be the heart of its appeal. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineJake ColeApr 4, 2018
In its final act, the film abandons its fruitful investigation of belief systems in favor of a simplistic articulation of Mary's inspiration. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyMay 23, 2018
Art is actually as complicated as the lives that inspire it, which is probably why Mary Shelley builds its specious and underwhelming climax around the question of ownership. Perhaps that’s the most contemporary thing about it: intellectual property passed off as modern myth. Read full review
50
The Film StageChristopher Schobert
If we spent a little less time on Mary and Percy, and a bit more watching Mary actually create, the result may have been different. Sadly, Mary Shelley is just not alive. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Mark MedleyJul 12, 2018
The film is somewhat amusing – especially Tom Sturridge, who turns Lord Byron into poetry’s version of Jack Sparrow – but immediately forgettable. Read full review
60
The GuardianBenjamin Lee
Shelley’s mistreatment by the literary elite because of her gender is a compelling, uniquely frustrating element and the film deprives us of the suitably grand exploration that it deserves. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterDeborah Young
Mary Shelley is a luscious-looking spectacle, drenched in the colors and visceral sensations of nature, the sensuality of young lovers, the passionate disappointment of loss and betrayal. But above all it is a film about ideas that breaks out of the well-worn mold of period drama (partly, anyway) by reaching deeply into the mind of the extraordinary woman who wrote the Gothic evergreen Frankenstein. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMay 24, 2018
This account is plausible and moving, at once a defense of genre fiction and of female creativity. But at times the differences between male and female writers can seem a bit schematic, in a way that undermines Mary’s intellectual autonomy. Read full review
25
The PlaylistKevin Jagernauth
A film desperately in need of an electric charge, Mary Shelley is simply another cinematic corpse on the table. Read full review
50
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldJun 14, 2018
Despite this rich emotional material (not to mention some gloriously shabby drawing rooms), the film feels surprisingly dull and conventional — two things its heroine most definitely was not. Read full review
39
TheWrapWilliam BibbianiMay 23, 2018
The film undercuts its admiration of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by judging, harshly, her life choices and reducing her timeless masterpiece to simplistic metaphor for a lousy marriage. Mary Shelley deserves better than Mary Shelley. Read full review
50
VarietyAndrew Barker
Impressively shot and suffused with a righteous feminist fire, the film is undercut by a confused and clunky script and a fundamental lack of thematic focus, turning an extraordinary story into didactic and disjointed melodrama. Read full review
40
Village VoiceAlan ScherstuhlMay 24, 2018
Mary Shelley marshals its evidence without revealing more, without connecting to the soul of the matter. Its Mary Shelley may walk and talk, kiss and rage, but she has no more of the true spark of life than that specimen in that lab. Read full review
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