Review: ‘The Bride!’ is a Mess and I Loved It
Maggie Gyllenhaal revives the Bride of Frankenstein with too many ideas and a hell of a lot of relish.
Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) is pissed off. Stuck in purgatory and seething in unreleased rage, she wants to tell a story. She wants the world to know the truth of Frankenstein, her most famous creation, and the bride who never came to be. In the book, the doctor is asked by his creature to create him a companion, but he’s so disgusted by the idea of them reproducing that he destroys the dead woman before she can be revived. Now, Mary Shelley has a sequel to birth, and she’s going to use young Ida (also Jessie Buckley) to make it happen. The monster (Christian Bale) wants a bride, but she wants to be something bigger.
Hollywood has an odd relationship with the bride of Frankenstein. She’s not a character in the book, and the image we have of her, with that grand bouffant of hair and glamorous facial scars, comes from the James Whale movie, where she’s only on screen for about ten minutes. In the ensuing century, the bride has largely been absent from Frankenstein adaptations and has not been given many opportunities of her own to be the heroine. She’s either a visual gag, a weird domestic nag in comedies, or a doll. We were supposed to get a bride movie with Angelina Jolie, but that fell apart years ago. For any writer or director, a bride story is essentially a blank canvas to create a whole new mythology and set of themes. For Maggie Gyllenhaal, it was an opportunity to delve into every idea she’s ever had about female rage, revenge, horniness, and tap-dancing.
Look, I get why a ton of people hate The Bride! I get those bad reviews that condemn its messiness and tonal yo-yo swings. This is a film doing absolutely too much and a lot of it simply does not work. And yet I had a total blast watching it. I was 100% taken in by its frenetic jitterbug of revenge fantasy, monster f**king, classic cinema homage, and music video fever dream. It’s a movie as inspired by MTV’s ‘90s peak as it is Bonnie & Clyde or the Universal monster flicks. Everyone involved is committed to the hilt to bringing to life this overwhelming vision of sex, blood, guns, and liberation. It’s about rage and vengeance, but it’s also a meta examination of Mary Shelley’s legacy, and a noir-esque detective story (featuring Penelope Cruz and Gyllenhaal’s partner, Peter Sarsgaard), and a sly satire of the concept of the movie-star persona, and a rousing 2010s-esque girlboss anthem. If even one person half-arsed it, the whole thing would fall apart at the frayed seams.
Gyllenhaal is an actress I’ve loved since I saw Donnie Darko as a teen, and then I saw Secretary at a too-young age, and it imprinted on me in a major way. I’ve long been drawn to her off-kilter aura, that sense that she’s always a step ahead of everyone else in the room. Her best roles allow her to be an underestimated figure who fights back with quiet verve. In her directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, let her dig deeper into this, through a story of motherhood and the taboo of admitting that sometimes it’s soul-crushing to give your entire self over to your offspring. The Bride! feels cut from a similar cloth, but there’s nothing quiet about it. Gyllenhaal is screaming from the rooftops.
And sometimes that screaming is pretty jumbled. Whenever Mary pierces through the realm of purgatory and possesses Ida/the bride, she suddenly begins spouting thesaurus-like vocabulary choices with the accent of a bawdy London barmaid. In one scene, she straight-up yells, “Me too”, one of the more unsubtle parallels Gyllenhaal hopes to draw between her story and current times. One wonders if Gyllenhaal started writing this script a decade prior because it does have the feel of that lightning-in-a-bottle moment in near-history where we felt like change might actually happen. It cannot help but tie The Bride! to a specific cultural mindset, which makes more sense for Barbie than this. Still, the decision to have this character, so often a distaff counterpart to the other monster and a silent one at that, have too many feelings is in keeping with Gyllenhaal’s too-many-ideas spaghetti-against-the-wall freneticism.
Her fury makes more sense when viewed through the lens of a reimagining of classic cinema, more so than of literature (having Shelley be the narrator of sorts who teases the sequel drop is a reference to The Bride of Frankenstein, which also featured the same actress playing both author and monster.) It’s certainly at its most dazzling when it revels in the styles of pre-Code gangster cinema, early musicals, and kitschy ‘50s sci-fi B-movies. Those musical numbers are especially fun: part Fred & Ginger, part Lady Gaga. They’re an escape for the monster, who found a reason to live through the fluffy movies of a handsome cipher of a movie-star (Jake Gyllenhaal – and honestly, let the Gyllenhaal siblings make a big MGM-esque musical together.) But they’re also another example of The Bride! as a piece of proud artifice.
This is a movie where everyone acts as though they know they’re in a movie. The dialogue is highly practiced and dramatic, and the acting matches it. There’s a gothic fairy-tale logic to the action, like with how the scientific mumbo-jumbo of how the revival of the bride works (shout out to Annette Bening as the mad-ish scientist and her loyal maid, the iconic Jeannie Berlin.) Some elements are grounded, particularly in terms of how often women’s trauma is ignored or exacerbated by the institutions intended to help them. There’s probably a whole other movie with a whole other tone to be made about Cruz and Sarsgaard’s characters, with the latter an ineffectual cop who’s too wimpy to embrace his own corruption and who lets his secretary do all the work. But make no mistake: Maggie Gyllenhaal has flung this movie into space. It knows it’s bombarding you and it doesn’t care because it’s having too much fun bellowing into the crowd as the music plays.
The Bride! is probably going to lose Warner Bros. a ton of money. Good. First of all, let David Zaslav suffer a little bit as he continues to destroy a cultural institution in the name of becoming a billionaire. Second, I am so effing sick of movies only being discussed in terms of their financial benefits. Why are so many people online desperately invested in a movie’s commercial prospects and acting like they’re shareholders? Fandom is a numbers game now, for some reason, and I hate it. Personally, I love that Maggie Gyllenhaal got a sizeable budget and the freedom to make The Bride! How cool that this risk-free, anti-inclusivity business let this one slip through the cracks. You’ll know, going into the cinema, if this movie is for you. I knew instantly that, had I seen it aged 15, it would have become my entire personality. I’d follow the bride into hell and tap-dance along the way.
The Bride! is in theatres now.
