When Haifaa al-Mansour directed her debut feature Wadjda in 2012, it represented a breakthrough on many levels - it was the first film to be shot entirely in the director's native Saudi Arabia and the first to be directed by a Saudi woman in an era when women in that country could not vote or drive.
It was also a delicately told and touching story that quietly but effectively advocated for the inevitability of changes to attitudes to women - something that is being borne out by the relaxation of some of the restrictions imposed on women in Saudi society.
So on paper you can see why Al-Mansour was attracted to the life story of Mary Shelley, the creator of arguably the most influential horror story in literary history, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.
Shelley was the daughter of the proto-feminist firebrand and single-mindedly anti-establishment Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to her daughter. As a teenager she scandalised her father, William Godwin, when she eloped with 21-year-old married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom she had a tumultuous relationship until his death at the age of 29.
Al-Mansour's film Mary Shelley should have been a celebration of a passionate trailblazer. Unfortunately it's ended up as an overlong, staid and stuffy period drama that does little more than scratch the surface of what drove Shelley to produce her magnificently complex and intriguing monster.
WATCH | The trailer for Mary Shelley..