Crew
Director/Screenplay – Nora Unkel, Producers – Frederic Fiore, Robert Menzies, Gabriel Rosenstein, Devin Shepherd & Eric Tavitian, Photography – Oren Soffer, Music – Jonathan Cziner, Visual Effects Supervisor – Helen Thach, Production Design – Madeline Wall. Production Company – Wild Obscura Films/The Spitting Image/Zed.Film/Eggplant Picture and Sound.
Cast
Alix Wilton Regan (Mary Godwin Shelley), Giullian Gioiello (Percy Shelley), Claire Glassford (Claire Claremont), Philippe Bowgen (Lord Byron), Lee Garrett (Dr John Polidori)
Plot
The summer of 1816. Mary Godwin accompanies her lover Percy Shelley, along with her half-sister Claire, as they go to visit Lord Byron in a villa he has rented on the shores of Lake Geneva. As they revel, Byron challenges them to write a series of ghost stories. While they are there, Mary miscarries and her nightmares about such are wound into the story she writes about the scientist Frankenstein. Mary also experiences difficulties with Percy who dragged her away to celebrate free love but has now been financially cut off by his father, forcing them to marry. These frustrations work their way into her story.
A Nightmare Wakes is based on the historical meeting between Percy and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. In May of 1816, the poet and cause celebre Lord Byron was renting the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, along with his physician John Polidori. On May 14 of that year, he was visited by the poet Percy Shelley, an admirer of Byron, along with Percy’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend Mary Godwin, and her half-sister Claire Claremont. Kept inside by rain for several days, the group amused themselves by coming up with ghost stories. This session produced two landmark genre literary works – Polidori published The Vampyre (1819), the first ever vampire story, while Mary conceived of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), which casts a giant shadow over the horror genre – see Frankenstein Films.
The Villa Diodati Writer’s Group has an undeniable fascination on film and there have been several films based on the events with Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986) with Natasha Richardson as Mary, Gabriel Byrne as Byron and Julian Sands as Percy; Haunted Summer (1988) with Alice Krige as Mary and Eric Stoltz as Percy; the Spanish-made Rowing with the Wind (1988) with Hugh Grant as Byron; and is included as part of the biopic Mary Shelley (2017) with Elle Fanning as Mary, Douglas Booth as Percy and Tom Sturridge as Byron. There are also other such oddities as Frankenstein Unbound (1990), which had time-traveller John Hurt encountering both Mary Shelley (Bridget Fonda), Byron (Jason Patric) and Percy (Michael Hutchence), along with Frankenstein and his monster; and the Doctor Who episode The Haunting of Villa Diodati (2020) where Mary (Lili Miller) is inspired by a broken Cyberman.
A Nightmare Wakes is a further take on the events at the Villa Diodati. It was a debut film from Nora Unkel. I immediately had problems with suspending my disbelief in the recreation of the historical events that Nora Unkel creates. This all comes in the casting. First, we get Giullian Gioiello as Percy Bysshe Shelley. A look at Gioiello’s background shows that he is of Italian-Taiwanese descent, although could easily pass or Latino on screen (which is what I originally assumed he was). The other is Lee Garrett cast as Polidori – I can find no details about his background, but he looks as though he is African-American. I get the whole idea of colourblind casting. When it comes to something like Shakespeare, sure go ahead. On the other hand, here we are talking here about historical figures who lived relatively recently to the extent that there are existing portraits of all of them – you can Google pictures of what Shelley and Polidori looked like. And the simple truth is that Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Polidori were white dudes, no question about it, and to suggest or give the impression otherwise is to rewrite presentist calls for racial diversity onto an era where such did not exist. And that to me is historical dishonesty and something that kills any suspension of disbelief I am willing to make in a film.
Furthermore, Alix Wilton Regan’s Mary is a modern woman of average stature, whereas the portraits of Mary show her as frail and small of build. Not to mention that Regan looks a lot older than the eighteen-year-old that Mary was at the time. Even aside from that, both actors playing Byron and Shelley seem to have been chosen for their male model looks more than anything. I had zero problems with Julian Sands, Eric Stoltz, Gabriel Byrne, Hugh Grant and others cast as Shelley and Byron in the abovementioned films – well okay, Michael Hutchence as Shelley in Frankenstein Unbound was stunt casting – even though they were much older than their historic counterparts because they engendered a suspension of disbelief in the characters. But none of the male actors here do anything to subsume themselves in period dialogue or behaviour. The film at least pays okay attention to achieving period detail on a budget.
Like the recent Mary Shelley, A Nightmare Wakes is a feminist take on the story and one that heaps blame at the feet of the men. Much of the story takes as its focus how irresponsible and immature Percy Shelley was with his inability to provide for he and Mary when he was cut off from his family’s money in contrast to Mary at whose feet was thrown the responsibilities of child-rearing. Unkel even gives us a scene where Percy forces drunk sex on Mary when she doesn’t want it and discourages her from writing her novel. I would challenge Nora Unkel to come up with any proof that such things ever happened according to the historical record.
There are some points where this touches on historical reality but mostly the film’s script cherry picks historical fact to fit its case – it has Mary miscarrying at the villa whereas such had occurred a year earlier, before they had even left England, and it was Claire who was the one that was pregnant (to Byron) when they arrived. It is more an example of a film that selectively retells history in order to make a thesis that it has already made its mind up about. The reality is that Mary loved Shelley – she lacked the modern feminist dislike of certain male behaviours that Nora Unkel has decided she needs to be outfitted with – if such existed, there is no historic record of them.
The least effective parts of A Nightmare Wakes are when it tries to occasionally wind in aspects from Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein is played by Giullian Gioiello who also plays Percy. We see aspects of the story reflect the events around Mary. The most absurd scenes are when Gioiello becomes a dark mirror version of Percy who woos, beds and influences Mary. Transforming Victor Frankenstein into a dark romantic figure is absurd – not to mention is one that offers a serious misreading of what the book is about where Frankenstein is an earnestly misguided creator, not a Machiavellian or even a Byronic figure.
Trailer here