Mary Shelley, the film, opens on a shot of young Mary (Elle Fanning), about 16, wearing a thick, variegated, cable-knit sweater, sitting idly on a tombstone, and thumbing through an old volume of ghost stories, spitballing macabre tales in her head. Although the scene takes place in England in 1814, it could easily be, with perhaps only the addition of a Polaroid camera, a scene of a 2018 Brooklyn hipster scratching out her own dark poetry in a Moleskine notebook while on break from her promising tech internship.