Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (2017) is Haifaa al-Mansour's period drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Elle Fanning plays the teenager who would write Frankenstein, in the years before anyone knew her name. A girl, a runaway romance, and a monster born from grief.

In 1810s London, the daughter of a radical philosopher falls for the married poet Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth) and elopes against her family's wishes. Their bohemian freedom curdles into debt, infidelity and the death of a child. Then comes that famous rainy summer on Lake Geneva with Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) and Dr. Polidori, where a ghost-story dare lights the spark for the novel that outlived them all.

Al-Mansour, the first female director from Saudi Arabia, frames the biography as the story of a woman fighting to put her own name on the cover. Bel Powley appears as stepsister Claire, Maisie Williams as her friend Isabel. The gothic gloom here comes less from candlelit sets than from the very real loss an eighteen-year-old poured onto the page. Stream Mary Shelley (2017) online on iFILM.