The Bride! is in theaters on March 6.
Frankenstein’s lightning-streaked bride has been an enduring image on screen ever since James Whale, the director of the original 1931 Frankenstein film, committed her to celluloid in his campy 1935 sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. Whale’s follow-up latched onto a subplot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, involving the Creature’s demand for a female companion, and it became not just a commercial hit but an enduring commentary on gender and sexuality. 90 years later, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! brings her back to life through a contemporary feminist lens, paying homage to both the Depression-Era classic and Shelley’s 1818 novel. Yet as much as the actor-turned-filmmaker reassembles this Gothic horror story with themes of consent, gender violence and female agency, her movie manifesto is garishly stitched together.
As with Bride of Frankenstein, the film uses Mary Shelley as a framing device and casts Jessie Buckley in the dual role of the British author and the eponymous monster just as actress Elsa Lanchester did before her. But where the Bride arrives towards the end of that film, here she takes centre stage, and Buckley proves a formidable force. In shadowy, black-and-white close-up, she first appears as Mary, looming over proceedings like a devilish, rage-filled spectre seeking to course-correct “the paucity of a stifled mind” by continuing her creation story through a female subject. It’s pretty bold of Gyllenhaal to have a fictionalised Shelley ridicule her own work and her own mind, but I guess she wouldn’t be the first filmmaker to play fast and loose with the legacy of a British female author.
The film’s Mary takes brutal possession of Ida (Buckley), an American woman living a hedonistic life, drinking and cavorting with gangsters in a Chicago speakeasy of 1936. Buckley lurches schizophrenically between the competing female minds, raving in Mary’s clipped English vernacular and throwing drunken accusations at a mob boss called Lupino (Zlatko Burić), which leads to her inevitable downfall.
In comes Christian Bale’s Frank, the 100-year-old Frankenstein’s Monster of legend, in search of female companionship to combat his loneliness. He meets Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), a scientist based on Bride of Frankenstein’s Dr. Pretorious, whose gender swap from antagonistic “Father of creation” to quirky “Mother of creation” is barely drawn out beyond the blunt humour in her questioning of Frank and his carnal intentions for his mate. Still, she’s “mad” enough to accept his commission, and once Ida is reanimated, the plot becomes an erratic mash-up of Bonnie & Clyde, Joker: Folie à Deux and Poor Things.
The Bride and Frank have an oddball dynamic; she’s the black cat to his golden retriever energy, which offers some comedic charm. Suffering from amnesia, she’s sceptical of his claim to her, knocks glass receptacles from tables when she doesn’t get her way, and gets frisky at a “deprivation” disco. All the while, he gazes on adoringly; ready to smash some skulls if any gents get overfamiliar – which they do. Attempted rape as a plot device feels pretty hackneyed at this point, but given the overarching themes, it’s unsurprising, albeit tedious. It’s the violent catalyst for the two monsters to go on the run, murdering (sometimes accidentally) their way from the Midwest to the East Coast and back as a litany of subplots and side characters overwhelm the story.
The Bride’s past relationship with crooked detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) is lazily shoe-horned in through late-stage exposition, while his more capable secretary and wannabe detective Myrna Mallow (Penelope Cruz) becomes a “woman vs the patriarchal workforce” trope. As The Bride starts to remember snippets from her life, her incoherent ramblings suddenly make her the unwitting poster child for female liberation. Cue spinning newspaper headlines saying “GIRLS RRRIOT” and ladies rocking ink-splotted lips and wild hair as they start pelvic-thrusting on car bonnets. It’s a somewhat juvenile distraction from the emotional core of this story about a woman defining her identity on her own terms.
Frank’s almost homoerotic affection for his favourite movie star, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), fuels the monster’s misguided romanticised ideals, but the script falls short of delving any deeper into the queer themes laced into the very Frankenstein films The Bride! takes major inspiration from.
Gyllenhaal clearly has an affection for that cinematic age and uses her modern lens to explicitly show scenes of sex, desire, violence and gore that would’ve never made it past the Hays Code censors back in the day. She also heightens the monstrous romance with a few manic dance sequences and hallucinatory movie scenes set against Karen Murphy’s captivating steampunk Depression-era sets, with Sandy Powell’s rebellious costuming marrying punk rock with classic ’30s styling. It’s a gritty yet grandiose world, with impressively monstrous hair and make-up design, but the choreography and cinematography don’t quite capture the swing time magic the film references, and coupled with the score, things hit more of an awkward rock-opera note than truly raging against the patriarchal machine.
The Bride! is guilty of overindulging in feminist buzzwords and girl power imagery; it even has Buckley’s Bride jarringly screaming “Me too! Me too!” in the final act. But it never lives up to the radical display of female autonomy it promised. And therein lies the real tragedy.
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