The film project about young Mary Shelley previously titled “A Storm in the Stars” with Ellle Fanning and Bel Powley, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour, has been retitled as the more obvious and direct Mary Shelley, especially as the competing Mary Shelley’s Monster project has fallen to the wayside in film development. Footage of the film still in post-production was shown at the Berlinale Film Festival with publicity images from the production released, primarily of Fanning as Mary sitting at her mother’s grave stone.

The film features two Game of Thrones cast veterans among the supporting cast: Stephen Dillane (Stannis Baratheon who roasted his own daughter in a failed bid for the throne) plays Mary’s father William Godwin, who treated this daughter only slightly better (he banned her from the house and refused to see her after her elopement with Shelley), Maisie Williams (the assassin-in-training of the Many Faced God) plays Isabel Baxter, Mary’s Scottish girlhood BFF who is forced to separate from her as well due to Mary’s shame…shame…shame. Douglas Booth plays Percy Bysshe Shelley, with Bel Powley (Diary of a Teenage Girl) playing Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont who gets them all entangled with Lord Byron, played by Tom Sturridge, while Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey) plays Mary’s evil step-mom Mary Jane Clairmont. The movie was filmed in 2016, with Dublin standing in for London, and on sound stages in Luxembourg for Geneva. The focus of the film is suggested to be the turbulent time in Mary’s life after the return from the elopement featured in The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley, and the “Gothic Summer” on the shores of Lake Geneva with Byron and Polidori, and the repercussions of her “illicit” relation with Shelley.

There were no announcements of major sales from Berlin, yet, or a release date. but the film has popped up on movie pirate sites for several months, most of them dead end for the time being, so if you want to download the Mary Shelley movie for free, you’ll likely be disappointed, as the Shelleys’ battle for justice continues 200 years later, and still wait for a major distributor.