Bride of Frankenstein meets Bonnie and Clyde—and a few dozen other movies—in The Bride!, a feminist retelling of the James Whale classic filtered through the lens of Mary Shelley’s original creation that opens in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. This overstuffed hodgepodge doesn’t seem to work on even the most basic levels of narrative storytelling, but there’s great beauty in many of its individual pieces, which have been stitched together by a truly mad scientist: in this case, writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, in her sophomore feature behind the camera following The Lost Daughter.
The Bride! opens with none other than Mary Shelley herself, portrayed by Jessie Buckley, in some lost purgatory that amounts to an extreme close-up amidst a black void. She laments that her great work, Frankenstein, was never finished—despite being published more than three decades before her death, and personally re-edited by Shelley a dozen years after its original release—but she can sense the opportunity that she’ll soon have to rectify that.
Enter gangsters’ moll Ida (also Buckley), who was just living it up in a 1930s Chicago speakeasy before being possessed by Shelley mid-sentence. Ida is part of a crew that works under mob boss Lupino (Zlatko Burić) and also includes colorful lackeys played by John Magaro and Matthew Maher, who try to corral her once the verbose possession takes hold. And whoops—she’s dead after a nasty fall down the stairs. But did you catch the Ida Lupino reference?
Buckley is likely to win a (much deserved) Oscar for her performance in Hamnet, and while The Bride! is no Norbit-like threat to her chances, it also doesn’t do her any favors. Buckley is terrific as Ida, but the personality takeover feels like schtick, and gets old pretty fast. Exactly what is the point of Shelley’s possession of Ida? Apparently, to serve as a live-wire thesaurus, shouting out strings of synonyms mid-sentence with the gusto of a Tourette’s-like tic burst. Yeah, we get it: she was literate.
But guess who else is in town? Why, our friendly neighborhood Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale)—call him Frank—making his way into town to visit the doctor he has heard can raise the dead. “Can I speak to Doctor Euphronious?” he asks, before being met with the classic “I am Doctor Euphronious!” by the good doctor (Annette Bening), who is, in fact, a woman. Jeez. This guy really is a monster.
Frank wants Euphronious to make him a bride, a request he first brought to the original Dr. Frankenstein more than a century ago; this guy must really be lonely by now. His prospects are dashed every time a woman glances upon his face and recoils in horror—note the entrance by the doctor’s assistant Greta (a scene-stealing Jeannie Berlin)—and you can guess where this is going long before they dig up poor Ida.
Waitaminute… so the real-life author of the novel Frankenstein has returned from her grave to possess the bride of her fictional creation? How does that work? Is this a Jacob’s Ladder scenario unfolding in the mind of a long-dead narrator? If so, how does she know much about 1930s Chicago? Wouldn’t it have made more sense for her to possess Ida upon resurrection, instead of while sucking down clams?
You know what, just go with it. Pretty soon Frank and Ida are off on their own little romantic adventure, which involves curb stomping perverts while getting caught in paparazzi flashbulbs with blood on their shoes. As the undead monsters light up the tabloids, hard-boiled detectives Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz) are in hot pursuit. Well, just as soon as Jake finishes his sandwich.
In The Bride!‘s finest moment, Frank and Ida are outed as monsters after talking during a movie, and after they flee the cinema they wind up at the fancy party attended by screen star (and Frank’s man crush) Ronnie Reed (played by the director’s brother, Jake Gyllenhaal). And as police swarm the building and Frank is rebuffed by his idol and everything comes to a head… why not a musical number? How about: Puttin’ on the Ritz. ‘Member Young Frankenstein?
If this description of The Bride! sounds like a wild, subversive comedy, be warned: it isn’t really played as such. But you’ll be chuckling away regardless, and you might be so entertained that you forget the film’s complete lack of narrative tension (what is it exactly that these monsters want?) and heavy-handed feminist agenda, which is inserted into the movie in such a ham-fisted way that our heroine is shouting “me too!” by the finale. If this really were a subversive comedy, then it must be parodying this kind of thing. Right?
What The Bride! has going for it is everything else, including some wonderful set design on the streets of 1930s Chicago and New York, wildly entertaining performances from the entire cast, trenchant cinematography from Lawrence Sher (which looks phenomenal in IMAX), and an evocative soundtrack from Hildur Guðnadóttir. Both of those creatives are coming off Joker: Folie à Deux, which The Bride! sometimes emulates in its big go-for-broke energy.
But the Joker sequel was downright modest compared to this indescribable feature that feels like Frankenstein, Bonnie and Clyde, Metropolis, Thelma and Louise, His Girl Friday, Duck Soup, and dozens of other classics all stitched together into one cinematic experiment. Why see just one movie when you can see all of them, all at once? The Bride! may be a monster—but it’s one that has been brought to vivid life with unbridled ambition.
