Mary Shelley (soundtrack)

The soundtrack was written for Mary Shelley, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour and released in 2017. The film stars Elle Fanning as Mary Godwin, Douglas Booth as Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Bel Powley as Claire Clairmont. Warner’s score was issued as an original motion-picture soundtrack by Decca Records, placing the recording within the label’s contemporary classical and film-music catalogue.¹

Warner was already known as a composer and musician as well as an actor. Her work on Mary Shelley followed earlier screen compositions and helped establish a musical identity for a period drama whose emotional emphasis is more intimate than conventionally monumental.

The score’s central character is its restrained, atmospheric treatment of historical drama. Rather than functioning as a parade of overtly period-styled gestures, the music supports shifts in intimacy, grief, intellectual excitement, and creative isolation. Piano, strings, and orchestral textures provide much of its expressive vocabulary, while quieter passages leave space for dialogue and natural sound.

This approach suits the film’s concentration on Mary’s inner life. The score does not attempt to reproduce music from the early nineteenth century; instead, it uses modern cinematic writing to connect a historical setting with contemporary ideas about authorship, loss, desire, and independence. Its recurring sonorities therefore operate less as literal documentary detail than as psychological framing.

The soundtrack follows Mary’s movement from adolescence and romantic idealism toward artistic self-definition. Its musical role is especially significant because the film presents the conception of Frankenstein as both a literary achievement and a response to bereavement, social restriction, and complicated personal relationships.²

Warner’s writing helps connect domestic scenes with the film’s more Gothic atmosphere. Tension is often created through accumulation, sustained harmony, and changes in texture rather than through conspicuous shocks. That restraint allows the score to echo the emotional ambiguity of Mary’s circumstances: love and exploitation, collaboration and rivalry, and private mourning coexist without being reduced to a single theme.

The soundtrack belongs to a relatively unusual category: a modern score for a film about the making of a canonical novel, rather than a direct adaptation of that novel. Its subject consequently creates a layered relationship with Gothic fiction. The music evokes apprehension and the sublime without presenting the monster of Frankenstein as its primary musical object.

Another notable detail is Warner’s position as both composer and screen performer. Her career illustrates the increasingly porous boundary between acting, songwriting, and film composition in contemporary British and European cinema. The soundtrack is best heard alongside the film, where its pacing, silences, and changes in orchestral density reveal functions that are less apparent in an album-only listen.

Original motion-picture soundtrack

A recording containing music written for or associated with a specific film.

Film score

Music composed or selected to accompany a film’s images, dialogue, and dramatic structure.

Gothic fiction

A literary and artistic tradition associated with fear, the uncanny, psychological disturbance, and threatened boundaries between life and death.

Mary Shelley

The English novelist and essayist whose 1818 novel <em>Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus</em> became a foundational work of science fiction and Gothic literature.