A Nightmare Wakes Review (Film, 2021)
content warning: death by suicide, miscarriage, abusive relationships, gore, alcohol/drug abuse, misogyny
A Nightmare Wakes is a fictional retelling of the creation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Mary is happy, living with Percy Shelley and about to give birth to their first child. They spend their free time reveling with Lord Byron and John Polidori. Tragedy strikes in two waves: Mary loses the child, and Percy’s wife dies by suicide with her child.
Vulnerable and finally able to be alone together, Mary and Percy struggle to balance their relationship with their work. Lord Byron issues the challenge for the friends to all create terrifying ghost stories, and Mary is the only one to create off the prompt.
Writer/director Nora Unkel’s screenplay toys with historical fact to better bring out the themes she wants to explore in this story. She wants to use the writing of Frankenstein, a novel about creating life, to explore the expectations of women in creativity and life itself. Her version of Mary Shelley is defined by her role as a wife and potential as a mother over her skills as an author.
After the miscarriage, the other writers don’t even realize she’s competing with them in the ghost story contest. She wins because she comes up with a workable concept at all. Her inspiration is the tragedy in her life and a desire to bring back the dead. She is discouraged from writing the book for the rest of the running time because it’s her duty to protect her child during her second pregnancy.
The horror comes from a variety of circumstances. Mary is terrified of history repeating itself. She is the mistress, not the wife, of Percy Shelley when the film starts, and she knows he has the potential to leave her for another woman. Her first pregnancy meets a terrible end, and her doctor tells her she must stay in bed for months to ensure the safety of her and her child in her second pregnancy.
The characters in her unfinished story begin to haunt her, appearing as alternate versions of her husband and sister. Worse still, they represent Victor and Elizabeth Frankenstein, the loving husband and wife torn apart by the monster in her writing. Reality and fiction blend as she imagines Percy is cheating on her with her own sister, Claire.
The film becomes a cross between a pregnancy horror and a writing horror. This creates an unpredictable structure and uncomfortable parallels between childbirth and producing a novel. It comes to a head halfway through with Mary is forced to give up writing for the safety of her unborn child by her husband Percy, only to be abandoned when the baby is due and forced to rely on the support of the characters she can control with her mind and words.
Unkel has a great eye for style, which is essential in the writer-driven horror stories. This style of horror is meant to blur the lines between reality and fiction. The author, struggling to complete a manuscript, lives the horrors of their own creation.
Unkel’s choice to have the actors playing Percy, Claire, and Mary appear as the imagined characters in the story works wonders. There’s very little that sets apart Victor from Percy, Elizabeth from Claire, and the Monster from Mary herself as the story progresses.
The action shifts between the different versions of reality, only becoming more chaotic when the people in Mary’s life realize that her mental wellness is struggling. The people who love her the most realize that they, too, are in a horror story, powerless to stop the world of Mary’s imagination from causing them real pain and suffering. They had a hand in creating these struggles in Mary’s life, but it is her story to control and tell, not there’s.
The ending of the film is haunting. I did not expect the story going in this direction, and it feels like a slap to the face. You cannot mistake Nora Unkel’s intentions in telling this story with a conclusion like that. I am 100% here for the new wave of horror film directors defining their own narratives and themes with such clarity that no one can misconstrue their work to dismiss their intent.
A Nightmare Wakes is streaming on Shudder.
