Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Nora Unkel
Starring: Alix Wilton Regan, Philippe Bowgen, Giullian Yao Gioiello, Lee Garrett,
Claire Glassford
The famous gathering of Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin), Percy
Shelley, Claire Clairmont, John William Polidori and Lord Byron at a
villa on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816 - which led to the conception of
Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' - has previously been recounted in such films
as James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, Ken Russell's Gothic, Gonzalo Suárez's Rowing with the Wind and most
recently Haifaa al-Mansour's
Mary Shelley. With her directorial debut, A Nightmare Wakes, Nora Unkel is the latest to attempt to detail Mary Shelley's
creative and personal life, combining the two as a hallucinatory horror
movie.
Compressing various aspects of Shelley's life into roughly a year spent in
Geneva, A Nightmare Wakes sees the then Mary Godwin (Alix Wilton Regan) arrive with her married lover, the romantic poet Percy Shelley (Giullian Yao Gioiello) and her stepsister Claire Clairmont (Claire Glassford) at the
villa of Lord Byron (Philippe Bowgen). Soon after arriving, Mary
loses her unborn child through a miscarriage. Percy doesn't seem all that
bothered by the incident and appears to have eyes for Claire.
Bored one night, Byron challenges his guests to come up with a horror
story, and thus Mary begins work on what will become her most famous
literary creation. While writing the story, Mary suffers from a series of
nightmarish hallucinations in which she is visited by the character of
Victor Frankenstein and sees blood oozing through the walls and her lost
infant returning from beyond the grave. She also has to contend with Percy,
whom she eventually marries upon falling pregnant once more. Percy is at
once controlling and inattentive towards his wife.
Try as they might, filmmakers have yet to find a way to make the writing
process cinematic. No amount of swirling camera and swelling score can make
someone hunched over a typewriter - or in this case, scribbling with a quill
- seem exciting. Unkel's decision to blur the lines between Mary's private
hell and the nightmarish creations of her mind may have yielded more
worthwhile results if her hallucinations weren't so generic - they never
quite tie into her novel in a satisfying or organic manner, rather they feel
like they've been borrowed from any random psychological horror movie. It
doesn't help that the film is lit so murkily that you'll be squinting
through most of its night scenes to figure out what you're seeing.
Wilton Regan does her best in the lead role, but she's essentially playing
a character who has been reduced to a hysterical stereotype. Based on this
version of Mary Shelley, you might wonder how she ever had a writing career,
as she appears quite mad. Even more one-dimensional is Percy, one of the
great literary figures repurposed as a caddish boyfriend whose blandly
written dialogue never remotely suggests his abilities as a poet. The pair
are an odd choice to portray the famous couple. Mary was a mere 19 when she
wrote 'Frankenstein', yet she's played by the thirtysomething Wilton Regan,
who appears visibly older than the boyish Gioiello, despite Percy being
five years her senior. This visually graphic age disparity dilutes the idea
of Percy as a controlling force, as Mary often comes off as his older sister
rather than his younger lover.
A Nightmare Wakes awkwardly appropriates the conception of 'Frankenstein' for the
MeToo era, suggesting the story was inspired by the weight Mary Shelley felt
on her shoulders as a woman of her era, and equating the mad baron with her
own husband. Shouldn't it then suggest that she sees herself in the monster,
a slave of man? After all, even back in 1935 James Whale explored this
notion by casting the same actress (Elsa Lanchester) as both Mary Shelley
and the monster. In boiling Mary Shelley's story down to a rigidly feminist
framework, it neglects the wider social landscape of the period and how
'Frankenstein' was a product of an era when Britain was experiencing an
unprecedented industrial revolution that led workers to fear they would be
replaced by automation, while simultaneously being mired in seemingly
endless conflicts with its European neighbours. Now there's a story with
modern relevance!
