By George & Josh Bate
A year doesn’t go by that yet another movie or television series adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein debuts. Just last year, for instance, Netflix released Guillermo Del Toro’s Academy Award-nominated take on the classic story. Prior to this, Yorgos Lanthimos put a distinct spin on the iconic tale in the Emma Stone-led Poor Things. But while Frankenstein continues to be reanimated, The Bride of Frankenstein is seldom reinvented or reinterpreted, especially recently. James Whale’s Universal Monster movie from 1931 remains one of the best horror sequels of all time, with imagery of Elsa Lanchester’s bride enduring as a fixture of pop culture nearly 100 years later. The Bride!, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, brings this story decades ahead of its time to contemporary audiences and positions itself as a subversive, revisionist take on the Bride and the Monster of Frankenstein. Despite taking a number of bold creative swings, however, Gyllenhaal’s film is simply insufferable.
The Bride! takes place in a stylized 1930s-inspired setting and begins with Frank, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster played by Christian Bale, in desperate pursuit of a companion to ameliorate his loneliness. With the help of Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), Frank solves this problem by reanimating a murdered woman, giving newfound life to The Bride (Jessie Buckley). From there, the duo embark on an adventure that sparks a romance, causes radical social change, and generates the interest of the police and the mob. On paper, a quirky, original take of rich, untapped source material sounds like a home run, but the execution leaves much to be desired.
The Bride! bursts at the seems with ambitious ideas, throwing new concept or twists into the mix throughout its bloated 126-minute runtime. Gyllenhaal creates a film desperate to proclaim its originality, yet, upon even the most cursory of examinations, startlingly lacks novelty. With each point of supposed uniqueness injected into the film comes a blatantly obvious sign of where the idea came from, so much so that the viewer can practically see the seams where its influences are stitched together. The classic Bride of Frankenstein mythos is mashed together with the anarchic, revolutionary uprising energy of Todd Phillips’ Joker, which is then combined with a lovers-on-the-run from the law dynamic reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde and the punk rock tumultuous romance of Sid and Nancy. In theory, these elements could potentially work together, but in actuality, they’re cobbled together into a distorted mess, not unlike Frankenstein’s monster himself. However, unlike the creature, this experiment gone wrong never comes alive at all. The film teases many bold, brand new concepts but never fully commits to any, and certainly doesn’t execute any of them successfully.
The Bride! begins almost immediately on shaky footing and never gains its balance. Gyllenhaal gives her film a bizarre meta-layer through the inclusion of Frankenstein author herself Mary Shelley as a character. The Bride of Frankenstein did this, of course, in having Lanchester play both the Bride and Shelley, but that decision gave the film narrative structure and a subtle tribute to the story’s author. The Bride!, conversely, includes Mary Shelley in the most unusual of ways as, in this world, she possesses the body of a woman in the 1930s. This decision then collides directly, and awkwardly, with the lore that the film goes on to establish, as it’s said that Doctor Frankenstein the man, not the book character, existed in this universe. Instead of adding depth or originality, the inclusion of this element feels simultaneously indulgent and cringeworthy. Buckley’s Bride character goes back and forth between times of speaking coherently as Penny (the reanimated corpse) to then scattered and incomprehensible as aspects of Shelley’s personality poke through, often from line to line. The convoluted characterization of the titular character reflects the film’s struggles more broadly, as scenes lurch from one idea to the next without any sort of harmony or rhythm, including an extended dance sequence so out of place it feels mind boggling that it was filmed at all, let alone included in the final cut.
Buckley, fresh off her acclaimed role in Hamnet, delivers an impassioned yet scattered performance. Her character is a revolutionary, a romantic, a survivor of tragedy, and someone who becomes a symbol of something greater, sometimes all within the same scene. And yet the film, nor Buckley, never fully settles on who she actually is underneath all of these identities. It feels unfair to pin the fundamental problems with the Bride on Buckley, who has consistently proven her range in projects like Men and, more recently, Hamnet. Unfortunately, in The Bride!, Buckley is tasked with giving life to a character whose presence is constant but is never clearly defined. Buckley rants, raves, rhymes, fluctuates between distracting accents, and spews all manner of word salad as the Bride, which highlight the film’s prioritization of style over substance so glaring. For as evident as its myriad of issues are, the greatest misstep of Gyllenhaal’s film is its entirely ill-conceived characterization of the Bride as a character.
Christian Bale, by contrast, gives the film’s stronger turn as a more traditional, serious Frankenstein’s monster. His portrayal is akin Boris Karloff’s iconic take on the character, both in physical appearance and in seriousness, though unlike many modern Karloff-inspired interpretations, Bale rarely ventures into comedic territory. He excels with the material at his disposal, but, like Buckley, is hindered by a wayward script and unfocused amalgamation of themes and subplots.
An already unfocused film becomes all the more unwieldy through the inclusion of numerous poorly-conceived subplots. Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz play detectives in pursuit of Frank and the Bride following a murder they committed. John Magaro plays a member of the mob tasked with killing the Bride. Jake Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, is Ronnie Reed, a film star that Frank is obsessed with. And there’s a woefully underdeveloped thread about a Joker-esque uprising that the Bride’s actions have fostered. Not a single one of these elements stands out as particularly compelling, instead primarily serving as a reflection of Gyllenhaal’s lofty, yet misguided, ambitions.
The Bride!’s sole redeeming factor is its technical achievements. Gyllenhaal crafts a visually striking film, with gorgeous cinematography from Lawrence Sher and immersive, meticulous production design that makes strong use of its stylized 1930s setting. Hildur Guðnadóttir also provides a gripping score that heightens the emotion and intensity of key moments. Seeing the film in IMAX is certainly impressive, but no premium format is capable of masking its host of problems.
VERDICT: 3.5/10
With her new film The Bride!, writer and director Maggie Gyllenhaal admirably takes some bold creative swings, but all of them go badly awry. Her film wishes to be a contemporary feminist reimagining of a classic story, a revolutionary parable, a modern (ish) gothic-like romance, and a meta-commentary on these classic characters all at the same time, but fails resoundingly to synthesize these ambitious ideas and themes into one coherent narrative. From an inane dance number to numerous ill-fitting subplots and side characters to a downright bizarre decision to weave Mary Shelley herself into the narrative, the film leaps from misfire to misfire until it finally (and thankfully) ends. It desperately wants you to think it’s original and punk rock, but in actuality is a mangled amalgamation of many movies that came before it, namely Joker, Sid and Nancy, and Bonnie and Clyde. Technically, the film impresses with its make up, production design, and score. Christian Bale is compelling and Jessie Buckley delivers an impassioned performance, even though her protagonist is bogged down by an endless slew of rantings, ravings, rhyming, and distracting accent switches. But even solid performances and technically adept filmmaking can’t salvage this butchering of one of the greatest horror sequels of all time. Perhaps most damning of all, The Bride does manage one dubious achievement: it (narrowly) beats I, Frankenstein as the worst modern Frankenstein-related movie in recent memory.