‘The Bride!’ Review: Maggie Gyllenhaal Goes For Baroque in Messy, Misguided Post-Modern Monster Movie [D]

When the opening frames of The Bride! displays introductory text establishing that Mary Shelley wrote her classic Gothic tragedy, Frankenstein, on a dare, it feels like needless table-setting. Surely audiences don’t need reminding of one of the most famous monster stories ever told, or even of its iconic offshoots, including the James Whale film this one is updating, Bride of Frankenstein.

The purpose of that intro becomes clearer when Jessie Buckley emerges from the darkness — pale-faced, in shadowy makeup — narrating not as the monster’s bride-to-be but as Shelley herself, lamenting her struggles against societal ills before her untimely death. Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal reaches for feminist justification through this meta framing, using the Bride of Frankenstein story as a vehicle for a film about female oppression and emancipation. But she pursues these ideas with such blunt-force juvenilia that the film topples its own stated ambitions. By the end, that innocent dare feels like a far more inspired impetus for storytelling than the simplistic, triumphant Gothic girlbossing The Bride! ultimately settles for.

To its credit, this confused slice of societal critique-meets-monster-movie maximalism mostly embraces its weird ambitions, however misguided they may be. After the opening, Shelley narrates from her dark void as she locates a woman she dubs Ida (also Buckley) in 1930s Chicago. Ida becomes her vessel — possessed by Shelley’s spirit and driven mad — until she takes a fatal tumble down the stairs.

That’s when Frank (Christian Bale) enters. This is Frankenstein’s monster as traditionally conceived, a century later. He’s adopted his maker’s name and roams the Earth, finding little happiness aside from his enthusiasm for the movie star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). Scouring the city for a doctor who can produce a bride to cure his loneliness, he finds Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), an experimental scientist. Rest assured, the two dig up Ida’s corpse and reanimate her in the mad-science fashion Frankenstein stories demand.

From here, Buckley is tasked with shifting between the lost confusion of her true body, Shelley’s wild possession over her, and Shelley’s more authoritative command as narrator. She’s up to it, moving fluidly between tepid fear and garrulous deliriousness, often speaking in rhymes or strange word-associations. Bale has the simpler task of Frank’s simultaneous animalistic rage and comical self-pity, though he serves well as an anchor for the audience to better embrace the recklessness of these two monsters.

The two fall for each other, naturally, bonding over society’s castigation of their monstrousness and a shared need to meet violence with violence. A killing at a club following an attempted assault on Ida sends them running, as Gyllenhaal tries to weave genuine romance and feminist reckoning into the irony of a monster movie doubling as an outlaw-lovers-on-the-run Americana travelogue. The film has Frankenstein and his bride dodging cops on rural dirt roads while female insurgent groups spring up in cities, inspired by The Bride’s acts of radical change. It’s Joker for neoliberal feminism and Badlands for 2010s Hot Topic shoppers in one package.

The hard truth is that The Bride!‘s shotgun-blast of moods and styles just doesn’t work, compounded by the script’s desperate socio-political reach. There are glimpses of a more fun movie in its less self-important elements. An anachronistic nightclub scene with Buckley dancing to electro music and strobe lights has genuine giddy inspiration, Gyllenhaal staying loose with the rules of her own universe. A choreographed gala sequence offers similarly tongue-in-cheek fun, putting a playful spin on the iconography she’s borrowing.

But the story itself, messaging aside, is rote and uninspired — as classical a doomed-lovers-on-the-road picture as you could imagine, complete with a tedious detective subplot. Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz do what they can with their gumshoe archetypes, though their arc is saddled with its own facile gender reckoning, as Cruz’s Myrna Wallow faces dismissal from male colleagues for being a woman on the job. Gyllenhaal’s heart is in the right place, but her broad-stroke recognition of patriarchy is nothing short of dire.

More calamitous are the film’s very foundations. Gyllenhaal may be meek but innocuous in her political angles elsewhere; the incorporation of Shelley as a character is where the film collapses under an accidental grotesqueness. Aside from the confusion of the base concept (is this in the real world or in Shelley’s narrative world, and if the latter, why does any of this matter?), taking control of a dead woman’s voice is presumptuous at best, and it’s the genesis of The Bride!. Gyllenhaal furnishes herself with a jurisdiction she hasn’t earned. The idea, presumably, is to return this figure of male-created, passive femininity to the voice of the original story’s author. But by pigeonholing Shelley into the hysterical register of the monstrous feminine, the film diminishes her humanity and any broader conception of womanhood it might have strived for. It’s an adolescent’s approach to subversive feminism. 

That extends to the ending, which hedges right when it needs to commit. For a film ostensibly about The Bride claiming her own autonomy, it’s content to contradict that in favor of a more expected, pat destination, indicative of the film’s broader unwillingness to engage with the messier realities of its ideas. Maybe that’s asking too much of a knowingly garish baroque genre medley, one meant to captivate through prosthetics, makeup, and horror-romance extravagance. But with fundamentals as undercooked as the societal critiques they’re meant to support, The Bride! makes for an ill-considered, hubristic experiment in every direction — a collection of disparate parts compiled into a gruesome, barely-living entity.

Grade: D

Warner Bros will release The Bride! only in theaters on March 8.