It isn’t much of a hot take to suggest this, but the only classic Universal monster movie better than James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein is his 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein. In fact, the only thing keeping it from being a legitimately perfect film is the “Bride” problem. She shows up toward the tail end of the third act and we get nary a chance to see Frank and his Bride spending much time together.
In her new blisteringly singular remix, The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal addresses this directly by spending an entire two hours unpacking what a relationship between two mostly dead monsters would look like. This isn’t a remake of The Bride of Frankenstein, instead, it’s a deeply feminist visual feast anchored by two live-wire central performances. It also has a messy, overstuffed script that never congeals into a coherent whole… and I’m OK with that.
Jessie Buckley (who’s likely about a week away from winning the Best Actress Oscar for Hamnet) plays the Bride. Well, not just the Bride. Let’s try this again. Buckley plays Mary Shelley, who, in her quest to tell a horrific love story, possesses Ida, a wild and nearly feral woman who frequents a mob-run bar in 1930s Chicago. After Ida is thrown down the stairs and killed by mobsters, she’s exhumed by a cripplingly lonely Frankenstein’s Monster (a properly unhinged Christian Bale) and Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (a very game Annette Bening), the mad scientist he has hired to build him a bride.
After pumping thousands of volts of electricity into her corpse, here comes the Bride, who, still possessed by the ghost of Shelley, goes on a Bonnie and Clyde-ish rampage filled with mutilated bodies, Rogers and Astaire-esque dance sequences, car chases and a love that death could never quench.
Gyllenhaal proves her bona fides immediately as a brilliantly singular visual stylist in just her second film as director. While her debut, The Lost Daughter, was an underrated psychological drama about complicated mothers, The Bride! feels like it was birthed from a different filmmaker altogether. Even with multiple narrative dead ends and reams of clunky dialogue, every frame is gorgeous, a product of a limitless imagination unbound. It’s a miracle the film even exists; it’s something so personal, so deeply strange that its release in megaplexes across the world by a major studio feels like a product of the 1970s auteur-driven New Hollywood movement.
As mesmerizing as Buckley is as the Bride, it’s also one of those performances that’s so “showy” that a lesser actor would have derailed the film. She plays the Bride and Shelley like different notes of the same song: Shelley is British, with a throaty, aristocratic delivery, while Ida/the Bride has a thick Chicago growl. Buckley bounces between the two with a manic intensity that feels equal parts Dissociative Identity Disorder, Tourettes and full-blown supernatural possession. She’s so volatile and unapologetically batshit that Frank is having the time of his life. He has been lonely for so many decades that her furious intensity immediately makes him feel alive again.
Is Frank and the Bride’s relationship meant to be unhealthy and toxic, blisteringly sexy, or sweepingly romantic? I’ll answer that with a resounding “sure?” In fact, that might be the film’s most potent metaphor: the movie itself is Frankenstein’s monster.
The Bride! features a “Monster Mash” needle-drop, a graphic curb stomping reminiscent of American History X, and a graveyard of wasted performances from Jake Gyllenhaal, Julianne Hough, Peter Sarsgaard, Penelope Cruz, and John Magaro. Complete with two or three completely pointless subplots, the movie is so overstuffed that the exclamation point in the title is a not-so-subtle hint of the excesses to come. It’s a bit of a train wreck, but I’m still recommending it with my full chest. It’s a mess, but my gosh, it’s a fearless one.
Maggie Gyllenhaal channels the dark and doomed romances of Badlands, Wild at Heart, and Joker: Folie à Deux alongside the punk chaos of Repo Man, the drunk-on-movies nostalgia of Cinema Paradiso, and the slapstick goofiness of Young Frankenstein. Tonally, it barely works on any level, yet I somehow still loved watching it. The Bride! doesn’t nail many of its thematic messages regarding women’s agency, but it’s still hard not to swoon over the sheer ambition of a movie this audaciously subversive. It easily could have been a shoddily thrown-together patchwork corpse of a movie. Instead it’s something breathtakingly, beautifully, and repulsively alive.