Honestly I would give this a solid seven but I bumped A Nightmare Wakes up to eight because all of the low scores are ludicrous and ignorant. I had trepidation that this would be poorly acted or badly directed but in fact it is a beautiful, haunting film that speculates on the private lives of Mary Godwin and Percy Byshe Shelley.
Neither of these creative people were at all stable, and had it not been for the fame of Mary's father and the wealth of Percy's aristocratic family, they doubtlessly would have been lost to history as a couple of drug addicts. A Nightmare Wakes makes no apologies for beating down on this reality in a way that likely upset the twee literature majors who were offended seeing Mary as she often was - a depressed woman who died of a brain tumor, who drank alcohol and took opiates, and lost not one or two but three of her children in infancy.
This film suggests that Mary may have even killed one of her children accidentally in a fit of post-partum psychosis, since Percy was frequently absent, out partying and philandering with other women (and men).
