Ken Russell’s wildly excessive account of the fateful night that led to the genesis of Mary Shelley’s idea for her gothic novel, portrays the emerging author and the young Romantic poets she held court with, taking part in a demonic séance.

June 16, 1816. In the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva an illustrious gathering of writers and poets are taking refuge from a gathering storm. Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne) and his biographer-physician John Polidori (Timothy Spall) are playing host to Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), his fiancé Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson) and her half-sister Claire (Myriam Cyr). They're an artistically unruly, incestuously entangled lot, given to imbibing hallucinogens, mauling each other over and flinging off gratuitous insults. So when this group of flamboyant fops and fantasists decide to hold a séance to test their propensity for wickedness by conjuring into life their innermost demons, the evening descends into a sex and opium-fuelled nightmare.

This fictionalised recreation of the events that led to the writing of Frankenstein sees director Ken Russell (The Devils) completely in his element, revelling fully in the seething psychodramas and fetid atmosphere of sexual abandon that inhabit this unruly literary fun house.

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