A Nightmare Wakes

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).

One to dodge people.

Showed promise with the initial premise - poorly executed.

The scenery is bland, repetitive and brings you down.

The actors are mostly poor but at least the lead lady is trying to do something.

It's a B level horror/drama that is lower than you would expect from any TV series/film production.

We all love the horror story, Frankenstein, but this is one horror of a story that you'll soon wish to forget. Nothing happens!

Avoid, unless you are struggling to sleep.

There was genuinely nothing about this that necessitated it being about historical figures. They took a few elements of Shelley's life, pasted names on some actors, and trotted them lifelessly around bland sets with a desaturated filter and some whispery dialogue, and you could have told the same story about a woman writing a book in any era for the exact same lackluster effect. Don't waste your time, especially if you're actually looking for horror.

I sat down to watch the 2020 movie "A Nightmare Wakes" as it was supposedly a movie based on Mary Shelley and the creation of the iconic "Frankenstein" story. Little did I know that I was in for a snoozefest of grand proportions from writer and director Nora Unkel.

The storyline told in "A Nightmare Wakes" was just horribly slow paced and rather uninteresting, to be bluntly honest. And it was a massive struggle for me to sit through this ordeal of a movie. But I endured, hoping the movie would eventually pick up its pacing and become interesting. But alas, it just never did, much to my disappointment.

This 2020 movie is listed as a drama and thriller. Yeah, you might have to look hard and long for the thriller aspect to the movie. It was a prolonged drama heavy on storytelling that proved essentially pointless.

I found "A Nightmare Wakes" to be a disappointing movie experience, and it was a movie that I had actually looked forward to sitting down to watch. And trust me when I say that I will never pick up this movie and view it again. The storyline was a struggle to get through the first time around, so why inflict additional self-torment by attempting a second viewing.

How true "A Nightmare Wakes" is to the actual life of Mary Shelley, I can only guess about, as I have no clue.

The acting performances in the movie were adequate, but it just was a shame that the actors and actresses had so very little of any proper contents to work with in terms of script, plot and storyline.

Don't waste your time, money or effort on this 2020 movie from writer and director Nora Unkel, because it is simply not really worth it. My rating of "A Nightmare Wakes" lands on a mere three out of ten stars. The movie does have some interesting enough details to it in terms of props, costumes and settings.

I've always thought Byron and Percy Shelly were assholes and if anything this film goes some way to confirming this.

The plot is constructed around the infamous time the Shelley's spent in Italy where Mary wrote Frankenstein.

Mary Shelly is buried about two miles from where I live so I was looking forward to this as an insight into the writing of one of the most important novels of the era.

Frankenstein and the birth of Victorian gothic writing laid the foundation for 20th century horror, it's importance can't be overstated. Films about books being written are always a bit tricky. Watching someone have ideas and write them down is not exactly riveting.

So A Nightmare Awakes attempts to weave the tragedy of the Shelley's private life into the creative process. The question this film asks is how much did Shelley's domestic instability, deaths of her children, sexual impropriety of her partner and husband affect her development of the novel?

It's difficult to imagine how anyone could have been psychologically affected by this level of personal tragedy, the film implies that Shelly was suffering from a deeper psychological issues which pure speculation. Shelley's world is certainly an unhealthy one.

The problem is the film takes too many liberties with Shelley's already troubled story and so feels a bit exploitive. Percy Shelley's death is the best example of this, trying to put a supernatural spin on his drowning Percy did die by drowning but it was a boating accident.

In the end this falls halfway between biopic and supernatural suspense. It doesn't really do with of those things well enough either.