‘Mary Shelley’ Toronto Review: Elle Fanning Biopic Gets Monstrously Silly

“It’s wonderful to see women stepping out of line,” said “Mary Shelley” director Haifaa al-Mansour when she introduced the world premiere of her film on Saturday night at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Saudi Arabia-born director could have been talking about her own journey to become a film director, but also about the subject of her film, the 19th century writer whose first edition of “Frankenstein” was issued anonymously because publishers of the time didn’t feel that the horror story was appropriate subject matter for a young woman.

“Mary Shelley,” which stars Elle Fanning as the title character and Douglas Booth as her partner, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, is a female empowerment movie on many levels, from the women-heavy crew to the characters who are forced to endure lines like this one, from Lord Byron: “I’ve always believed that a woman should be intelligent enough to understand what I’m saying, but not intelligent enough to form ideas.”