Movies
[Review] Mary Shelley Biopic ‘A Nightmare Wakes’ Offers Compelling New Look at Frankenstein’s Creation
The process of creation is oftentimes as fascinating as the creation itself, and that’s certainly true of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the tale of a scientist who gives life to a monster. Victor Frankenstein’s act of God-like creation has been told and reimagined countless times throughout the history of cinema, but seldom as uniquely as Nora Unkel‘s debut feature A Nightmare Wakes. Because Unkel’s film isn’t about Victor Frankenstein at all. Rather it’s about Mary Shelley herself, the film recontextualizing her own act of divine creation.
Alix Wilton Regan stars as Mary Shelley in A Nightmare Wakes, which puts us into the headspace of Shelley at the time she was writing Frankenstein. Challenged by poet Lord Byron to come up with a scary story, and haunted by the recent loss of a child, Shelley conjures up the tale of Victor Frankenstein and the iconic monster of his own creation, the lines blurring between her reality and her fiction as she pens the classic horror story.
Beginning with the haunting image of a pregnant woman walking into a body of water and killing both herself and her unborn child, A Nightmare Wakes is a film heavy with the burden of tragedy, painting as accurate a portrait as possible of that particular period of time in Mary Shelley’s life. Nora Unkel, it’s clear, is intimately familiar with Shelley’s life and the various hardships she endured, and she pulls no punches in bringing that story to the screen. Mary’s relationship with husband Percy Bysshe Shelley primarily takes center stage in A Nightmare Wakes, a courtship marred by a miscarriage and the subsequent death of another child. But it’s Mary who’s left to deal with the brunt of the pain, never truly loved or supported by the unavailable husband who only married her in the first place so that she wouldn’t leave him.
Alix Wilton Regan delivers an emotionally powerful performance as Mary Shelley, bringing to the screen a woman with a complex inner life but relatively simple desires. When Mary is explaining the story she’s writing to her friends, she describes the monster at the center of her tale as a creature that knows only pain and only craves love; it seems to dawn on Mary that she’s referring to herself in that moment, with Unkel taking some artistic liberties by suggesting that maybe Shelley viewed herself as the monster of her story. And Percy, A Nightmare Wakes posits, is her Victor Frankenstein, the film indeed representing Dr. Frankenstein as a sort of idealized version of Percy Shelley who appears to Mary throughout.
It’s this blending of flesh and blood reality with the ink of fictional creation that allows for A Nightmare Wakes to be such a compelling new look at a classic piece of art. Art is never created in a vacuum and is always, whether initially intended or even aware to the artist or not, a reflection of whatever its creator was going through at the time in which it was made, and Unkel’s film ambitiously adapts the story of Frankenstein through the context of its creation. It’s through this approach that we’re given insight into what that process very well might have looked like, with Unkel taking great care to accurately present some of the key life experiences that no doubt allowed for Mary to conjure up such a terrifying and enduring tale.
Thoroughly researched, (mostly) historically accurate and brought to the screen with clear affection for its real life subject, A Nightmare Wakes filters a biopic through the lens of a horror movie, painting a heartbreaking portrait of one woman’s pain and the enduring piece of art that it led her to create. And after so many years of seeing her greatest creation brought to the screen, it’s wonderful to see Mary Shelley’s own story recently taking center stage in female-directed films like 2017’s Mary Shelley and this one from Nora Unkel. It’s through these films that we can best understand Shelley and the iconic masterwork that will forever define her.
A Nightmare Wakes is now streaming as part of the virtual Salem Horror Fest.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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