“A lumbering assortment of various parts poorly stitched together and bursting at the seams” is an apt description of both Frankenstein’s monster and writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s very loose remake of The Bride of Frankenstein. If the mere inclusion of the splashy, self-aggrandizing exclamation point in the film’s title, The Bride!, grates on you, save yourself a few hours and skip this one.
Even the film’s staunchest defenders would describe it as an overindulgent hodge-podge of breathtaking style and remarkably clever substance that doesn’t really quite all work together. Individual components are downright extraordinary, with the film spurting and spasming from fantastic scene to fantastic scene, somehow never adding up to anything even passably resembling coherence or thematic clarity.
Take for example, the strange conceit that is introduced immediately: Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) is a ghost who possesses a woman named Ida (also Buckley) in what appears to be the 1930s. This will turn out to be wholly and completely unimportant. If removed entirely, not only does every plot element stay the same but so does whatever passes for a “message.”
Ida is killed in what looks to be an accident but is later described as an intentional murder. Some time later, Frank (Christian Bale) shows up at the lab of a mad scientist (Annette Bening) and asks her to make him a wife from a corpse. He is, in fact, Frankenstein’s original monster who has been shuffling around in isolation for more than 100 years. His only comfort has been the films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gylenhaal), a singer/dancer/actor/cad.
Ida is resurrected without her memory, and the couple stumble their way into a reluctant cross-country murder spree. Along the way, Ida inspires something of a feminist revolution, which consists of young women painting their face to match the black vomit stain on Ida’s face and yelling “brain attack!” That is objectively hilarious.
Much of the movie is, inarguably, really very funny. It is intentional to be sure. You do not end a film with “The Monster Mash” and demand to be taken seriously. The problem here isn’t the tone at all. It isn’t even necessarily that there is too much going on, although there is… I mean, the description above doesn’t even include Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as detectives or the subplot about a Chicago mob boss.
The big issue is that the narrative incoherence makes it impossible to find purchase. Gyllenhaal would likely say that the discombobulation is purposeful. That may be, but it doesn’t work. At least, it doesn’t feel good. It feels oddly frustrating. The ideas are all quite good, but none are seen through to enough of a resolution to be satisfying. The experience is like listening to a genius mumble in their sleep. “What does ‘everyone starts dancing like they caught a zombie virus during a cocktail party’ mean?” That is a thing that happens. It is actually pretty awesome.
It is fine that Gyllenhaal’s script doesn’t care about practical things. This is a movie about Mary Shelley possessing a dead woman resurrected to marry Frankenstein’s monster so they can do Bonnie and Clyde stuff. It’s fine that someone in the 1930s explicitly references astronauts, for example. It’s not about The Bride! needing to be realistic or consistent, it is about it needing to thematically fit together in a satisfying way. Which it doesn’t. Quite.
Buckley and Bale are such incredible performers, with the former putting on a dazzling display that is about as far away from her work in Hamnet as Omaha is from Stratford-upon-Avon. Add in Gyllenhaal’s obvious talent as a filmmaker and the cheeky devil-may-care attitude and it almost almost almost works. Almost.
It is a coin toss to decide whether the good narrowly outweighs the bad here or vice versa. It seems a crime to give a proverbial thumbs down to a movie in a genre at least adjacent to Scream 7. That uninspired trash showed how brutal a viewing experience can be just last week. The Bride! isn’t just watchable, it’s frequently massively enjoyable. A thousand more like this before Scream 8 please.
Grade = C
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Stephanie Zacharek at Time says “puppeteer Mary Shelley, with her black-and-white dead lady’s visage, surveys her creation from the far reaches of history, addressing the Bride directly as she throws her head back and cackles. In a voice that sounds as if it’s trying, but failing, to channel the scorched, winged fury of “Why’d Ya Do It?”-era Marianne Faithfull, she proclaims, “Yes, darling, you’re my monstah!” The point, lest you miss it, is that The Bride! isn’t just a movie, but a vehicle for ideas. It’s an intellectual joyride without the joy.”
Shakyl Lambert at CGMagazine says “I will always give props to filmmakers for taking massive risks, especially with a blockbuster-sized film like this. It already feels tailor-made to become a future cult hit. But for all its ambitions, The Bride! is a big swing and a miss.”
Anna Smith at Timeout says “Much like her peers Greta Gerwig and Emerald Fennell, Gyllenhaal has brought thought-provoking feminist concepts into a big-budget, accessible, genre-blending movie. In a perfectly meta moment, the credits roll to the tune of The Monster Mash. Here’s to a (graveyard) smash.”