FILM OF THE WEEK: The Bride! - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Few monsters in cinema carry as much cultural baggage as the Bride of Frankenstein. First shown for a few minutes in Bride of Frankenstein, the character became iconic almost instantly: a lightning-streaked coiffure, an electrified shriek, and the strange melancholy of a creature recoiling from the man she was made for. That brief appearance also contained one of horror cinema’s neatest tricks, with Elsa Lanchester playing both the Bride and Mary Shelley in a framing prologue that linked creator and creation. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s unruly new film, The Bride!, takes that doubling as its starting point and runs with it - though not always in a direction that make sense.

Gyllenhaal’s involvement initially felt like inspired casting behind the camera. As an actor she has built a career portraying women who are complicated, messy, and resistant to easy moral framing: from Secretary, to The Deuce, to The Kindergarten Teacher. Her directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, was a quietly ferocious study of ambivalent motherhood that trusted ambiguity and silence as much as dialogue. A feminist reimagining of Frankenstein’s most famous female creation seemed a natural extension of those interests. Instead, The Bride! throws every possible idea at the screen, sometimes thrillingly, often confusingly, and rarely with the discipline required to bind those impulses together.

The story begins with Mary Shelley herself - played by Jessie Buckley in crisp, theatrical tones and more eyeliner than Gene Simmons - addressing the audience directly, promising to tell us how the Bride came to be. From there we jump to Depression-era Chicago, where Buckley reappears as Ida, a sharp-tongued partygoer whose evening with a group of gangsters ends in a gruesome fall down a staircase. Her body eventually finds its way into the hands of Dr Euphronius (Annette Bening), an eccentric scientist persuaded by Frankenstein’s Monster - known simply as Frank (played by Christian Bale) - to build him a companion. Ida’s corpse becomes the raw material for the Bride, and once revived the pair embark on a violent road trip across America, evolving into a kind of Depression-era Bonnie and Clyde as they dodge police, crash high-society parties and gradually become folk heroes to the disaffected.

The punk attitude, the dinginess of 1930s Chicago and New York, the lavish deco spaces of the wealthy elite, and the kaleidoscopic geometric choreography of cinema musicals are all gloriously rendered, with Gyllenhaal capturing the seediness and sophistication, the inequality and escapism, and the beauty and violence.

These collisions between worlds – the cities’ underbelly and the elite, the gritty realities and the fantasy of cinema – are often thrilling to watch, but often lack any meaning. A scene where the Bride and Frankenstein gatecrash a fancy Hollywood soiree then initiate a Thriller-style group dance sequence, with guests becoming seemingly possessed before breaking out some manic group Charlestown choreography is fun to watch, with definite Baz Luhrmann energy – but its relevance remains a mystery. What dark forces are compelling people to dance? Unexplained. What does it mean? Unclear. Is there a point? Who knows.

This focus on style over substance is a recurring theme. The production and costume design are wonderful. The Bride’s electrocution leaving her with bleached hair and eyebrows and dye-stained skin is a wonderfully realised idea, and Frankenstein’s scars and stitches are visceral in their puckered, weeping realism. But narratively, it’s all flourish without focus.

The Bride’s channelling of Mary Shelley means Jessie Buckley is constantly ticking between a Chicago drawl and the English hyper-verbosity of the 19th century author, who also narrates the piece from her black and white liminal space. It’s silly and distracting, interrupting the pacing of the central Bonnie And Clyde-style plot to bang us over the head with a class on MetaFiction and Authorial Intrusion 101.

As ever, Buckley gives the role her absolute all, committing with undeniable force and charisma. Bale and Bening also lean gamely into the gothic absurdity, but supporting roles from Penelope Cruz, Peter Saarsgard, and Jake Gyllenhaal feel simultaneously unnecessary and underutilised in underdeveloped subplots.

It’s a shame, because there are interesting and powerful threads here about a city where women are abused and murdered without consequence. The Bride’s pseudo-psychic connection with Mary Shelley is overwrought, but her connection to the dead victims of gendered violence is a much more powerful and cohesively realised idea. Scenes where the Bride calls out misogyny and violence are marked by lingering glances from other women, contemplating their own capacity to fight back. This seed is effectively planted throughout the film, building towards wonderfully evocative scenes of riot girl-style protests, with women donning the Bride’s signature veil and brandishing their blackened tongues as they take to the streets demanding justice.

At times, Gyllenhaal’s use of sexual violence feels uncomfortably drawn out, with The Bride experiencing several moments of sexual assault and violence from men. In interviews, Gyllenhaal has said she wanted to show the pervasive sexism of the era (which seems to be the default excuse of every director putting sexual violence into seemingly every film these days), but during yet another lengthy scene of the Bride being groped, I felt genuinely angry at the excess. The Bride’s third act utterance of “What about me too?” is cringe-worthy, highlighting Gyllenhaal’s repeated instinct to thematically bludgeon. A musical cue at the end of the movie has a similar effect.

This lack of trust in her audience is strange given Gyllenhaal’s obvious intelligence. She proved with The Lost Daughter that she has an instinct for psychological precision and narrative restraint, yet The Bride! operates in the opposite mode, piling concept upon concept until the film collapses under the weight of its own cleverness. What should have been a bold feminist resurrection of one of horror cinema’s most intriguing figures instead feels like a beautifully dressed experiment that can't quite decide what story it wants to tell.

There is undeniable style here, as well as a boldness and energy that Gyllenhaal will hopefully channel with more focus and direction into her future work. But for all its ambition, The Bride! ends up feeling less like a thrilling act of cinematic resurrection and more like a stitched-together collection of ideas that never quite come to life.

Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Cinematography by Lawrence Sher. Edited by Dylan Tichenor. Starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Magaro, Jeannie Berlin, Matthew Maher, Linda Emond. 126 mins. In cinemas now. 

• Watch the trailer below: