An opening title card to “The Bride!” informs viewers that Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein” on a dare. After two hours, the authorial intent behind what might drive Maggie Gyllenhaal to assemble this reimagining of “Bride of Frankenstein” remains much more opaque. Her take on the Bride of Frankenstein aims to be something like an acid monster movie, but it ends up unintentionally paying homage to the creature at its core. This film shows its flimsy construction more visibly than the staples on Frankenstein’s monster’s forehead.
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Studio notes and reshoots are standard for movies with an eight-figure budget like “The Bride!,” and they do not necessarily guarantee a negative outcome. Both have become part of the public narrative around the film, and the finished product demonstrates why. Editor Dylan Tichenor cannot reanimate the various components of this ambitious, audacious production – much less reshape them into a coherent corpus.
Gone is the free-floating logic of Gyllenhaal’s dazzling debut feature, “The Lost Daughter,” which did not have to explain when it was slipping between timelines and narrative modes. That montage flowed downstream of her masterful understanding of a character’s mental space. The filmmaker has no such insight into what makes Jessie Buckley’s Bride tick. The result is a disjointed viewing experience that never connects her or Christian Bale’s committed physicality to a consistent psychology.
Gyllenhaal might be aiming to create a multi-faceted protagonist, but her Bride of Frankenstein becomes a web of irreconcilable contradictions. The character is at once an eternal spirit stemming directly from the twisted mind of Mary Shelley (also embodied by Buckley in cutaway scenes), representing a female madness and perversity that no single body can contain. But as this plays out through Buckley’s Ida, a mob girlfriend in ‘30s Chicago brought back to life by Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) as a sex toy for Frankenstein’s monster, this conceptualization robs the girlboss-ing avenging angel of agency and autonomy. Shelley also declares that Ida’s identity should forever reside in relationship to the man she rides alongside, which makes for an odd wrinkle in the film’s feminist bona fides.
Even more baffling is the film’s approach to genre mash-ups. “The Bride!” conjures an appealing aesthetic in which the wild antics play out thanks to artisans like costume designer Sandy Powell and production designer Karen Murphy. They successfully infuse the film with Weimar-era flair, blending the classical American monster-movie setting with the verve of German expressionistic horror.
But trying to shoehorn in a third genre contemporaneous to the setting – the Busby Berkeley movie musical – pushes the film toward collapse. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Ronnie Reed makes a convincing surrogate for Fred Astaire in the song-and-dance sequences devised for the film. But his sister struggles to translate her thematic idea of why “Frank” (as the monster likes to call himself) finds these numbers so transfixing into a visual or narrative schema.
Film historians have long held that in the Hays Code era of Hollywood, dance sequences stood in for the sex scenes that censorship prohibited. These ecstatic displays of coordinated movement and expression enrapture a creature whose sexual frustration sets the plot of “The Bride!” in motion. He begins to visualize himself as a background dancer for Ronnie, but the vicarious thrills spill over into outright surrealist blurring between cinematic flights of fancy and his gritty reality.
These musical numbers, like much else in “The Bride!,” prove a messy morass of inspired intention and sloppy execution. The film feels too – well, Frankenstein-ed – together from various intriguing ideas that do not have the space to flourish. The only element that receives sufficient development is the “Bonnie and Clyde”-esque, “lovers on the run” story when Ida and Frank become nationally known figures for their vengeful violence. It’s during this flight that their shared interests in carnage and carnality begin to converge.
But even this plot thread starts to spoil once it emerges that the Bride has inspired copycats in a montage that feels all too reminiscent of Todd Phillips’ “Joker” movies. (Notably, “The Bride!” pulls heavily from that series’ filmmaking team – including producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff, cinematographer Lawrence Sher, and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir.) It might have landed with more impact if the film had a stronger sense of what the protagonist fought for beyond a generic notion of feminine rage.
Meanwhile, there’s a gritty underbelly of sexual violence and exploitation in the Depression-era underworld, exemplified by mob functionaries like Ida’s ex (John Magaro), that gives short shrift to a sensitive subject. And running parallel to the main narrative are two detectives, Peter Sarsgaard’s Jake Wiles and Penélope Cruz’s Myrna Mallow, hot on the heels of the wanted duo. There might be a version of the film where their gender dynamic of a determined woman consistently surprising the men around her echoes the Bride’s journey, but Jake and Myrna function too frequently as little more than tools for exposition dumping.
There’s a floor for entertainment with a cast this strong, especially two leads who can contort themselves bodily and emotionally with such dexterity. But “The Bride!” spends too long operating at that level because it cannot escape the mire of confusion about its own identity. The best description for what Gyllenhaal compiles here might come from within the film itself. Dr. Euphronius states that her experimentation aimed to disrupt well-behaved geometry, and the jagged lines and misshapen form of “The Bride!” pay that spirit unfortunate tribute. [C-]
“The Bride!” opens in theaters on Friday, March 6.
New York-based freelance journalist whose writing appears regularly on Decider, Slant, Slashfilm, and The Playlist, covering film with a focus on cultural context.
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