MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Monstrous error
MARIA DUARTE sees an entertaining biopic of Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley which plays down her significance as a groundbreaking woman writer
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Mary Shelley (12A)
Directed by Haifaa al-Mansour
TWO centuries after Mary Shelley wrote her classic work Frankenstein, regarded as one of the first works of science fiction, there have been umpteen film and stage versions of her complex and unconventional novel and this latest is a deliciously gothic romantic drama.
Shelley, played by Elle Fanning, was a feminist trailblazer who at the age of 16 ran away with the married radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth), taking her stepsister Claire Clairmont (Bel Powley) with her and with whom he later became involved.
She started writing Frankenstein when she was just 18 years old during a stay at the mansion of Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) in Geneva when he challenged his guests to a ghost-story writing competition. But she was forced to publish her work anonymously at first, due to the conventions of the time.
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