The Bride!

This world is a black hole... and so is this utterly incomprehensible movie.

The first few minutes of The Bride! set up a fascinating narrative device in which a very plummy British version of Mary Shelley (Jesse Buckley) is ranting to us from some unknown limbo about how Frankenstein was not the story she wanted to tell. No, it was its follow-up - i.e. Bride of Frankenstein - that really got her juices going, and this very movie we’re watching will be Shelley’s tale as intended.

Okay, intriguing conceit and early kudos to director Maggie Gyllenhaal for taking such a wild swing immediately. I had some problems with Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein for being too beholden to the source material, and The Bride! initially signals to us that this is going to be a new take with ‘ideas’.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Whatever kudos I gave out were immediately rescinded by the end of the next sequence where we’re introduced to an American woman named Ida (also Buckley), who is on some undercover mission in a high-class 1930s gangster bar. It’s bad enough that these scenes are confusing in a way that doesn’t advance the story; the baffling decision to have Ida be randomly possessed by Mary Shelley’s spirit from time to time is an unnecessary layer of complexity we don’t need. At the end of a truly exhausting opening 10 minutes, nothing about the plot, characters, or setting made any sense. Most worryingly, none of it was interesting.

After Ida’s aforementioned shoulder-rubbing with 1930s gangsters goes wrong and she’s killed, her body is dug up by Frankenstein’s Monster, aka ‘Frank’ (Christian Bale), and Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening, doing the bare minimum) so they can reanimate her into an undead companion for Frank because he is lonely. Look, the plot demands that Ida be reanimated into the Bride, and the movie doesn’t go into enough reasoning or detail for anyone to care, other than to see a 2026 rendition of an ‘IT’S ALIVE!!!!’ scene… which ultimately ends up being a visually underwhelming squib of a scene.

At this point, it’s become crystal clear that The Bride! is nothing more than an adaptation of a famous text in the vein of Emerald Fennell’s equally bewildering ‘Wuthering Heights’ - i.e., an adaptation in text only. But whereas Fennell stripped away all nuance, theme, and plot in favour of deliberate provocation (not a compliment), Gyllenhaal packs so many unexplored ideas into her movie that it ends up being an incomprehensible mess. Ambitious, sure, but a mess nonetheless.

Is this movie a dark romance? A period gangster piece? A buddy detective movie? A violent social study? There are elements of each, but not enough to form a coherent thesis. The closest thing to a theme is a brief detour after the Bride kills a cop and inadvertently inspires a wave of women to dress like her and rise up against the 1930s patriarchy. This is a fascinating idea, but unfortunately, Todd Phillips’ horrendously awful Joker is the main reference point, right down to the inclusion of some truly bewildering musical sequences that didn’t really need to exist.

Whatever promise there is quickly disintegrates into something with less substance than a Tweet that thinks it is deep just because it is dressed up in punk-rock clothing. The feminist allegory is almost carried through the entire movie as the Bride is dressed as a punk and generally has agency over what she does, but it’s all backgrounded to whatever shenanigans she and Frank get up to rather than being explored more thoroughly. At its best, it feels like an afterthought. At its worst, it feels shoehorned in.

By the time Ida-as-Shelley screams, ‘Here comes the motherfucking Bride!’ as the title card drops, the whole thing has become a gruelling mental exercise of clinging on for dear life in the vain hope that something clicks. Not even actors as talented as Buckley and Bale can do much to salvage this mess, though it’s certainly not without trying.

Bale’s take on ‘Frank’ is incredibly sincere and not that far removed from Jacob Elordi’s Oscar-nominated turn as the Monster. When he tells Dr. Euphronious about his loneliness, it really hits hard in a ‘what is actual acting doing here’ kind of way. But in something as gonzo as The Bride!, his performance sticks out uncomfortably like a neck bolt because he’s operating on an honest wavelength that’s not attuned with the movie he’s in. It’s even more jarring when Gyllenhaal suddenly goes into Who Framed Roger Rabbit? mode mid-movie with an impromptu Shaker-esque dance in the middle of a ballroom party. It’s logical to have Ida do this, but having Frank instigate the whole thing feels like something from a completely different movie. Whatever gauge you’d normally use to figure out whether his performance is good or not doesn’t work here, especially when it’s up against Buckley’s kamikaze performance.

It’s not that Buckley is bad per se, as she gives a big Hamnet-esque performance that commands the screen, sometimes to the detriment of our patience. Nor is there any issue with her playing two wildly different characters, as she’s talented enough to imbue enough nuance for each persona, such as the few moments when Ida wonders who she was pre-reanimation or Shelley almost winking at the audience whenever she takes over. But whereas there’s an emotional context in Hamnet to warrant an outsized performance, this movie falls so far short of giving Buckley the required foundation that she comes off as someone who imbues rage and pain with no proper channel to funnel it all through.

Now, to be fair to director Maggie Gyllenhaal, she did talk about how she was pressured by Warner Bros. to make several cuts to The Bride!, but nothing in this supposed bastardised version of the movie suggests that her director’s cut would be any more coherent. The kindest thing I can say about this movie is that Gyllenhaal clearly had grand ambitions for it, and whatever she is trying to say, she’s being very loud about it visually.

The anachronistic 1930s setting is gorgeous, and clearly no expense was spared with the set pieces, production design, and the sheer amount of period-appropriate vehicles. There’s a thrilling car chase sequence late in the movie that’s set at night, yet nothing was obscured by darkness, and the shots are skillfully held across several long takes that showcase Gyllenhaal’s eye for visual flair and framing. It’s just unfortunate that the visual language isn’t matched by the movie’s lack of substance. I was often left wondering ‘why was this shot used’ and ‘what I’m seeing doesn’t match what I’m hearing’ rather than marveling at how or why everything works as a whole. It’s like the cinematic equivalent of junk food, except there’s too much of the junk and not enough of the food.

When the nicest thing I can say about a movie is how good it looks, that’s always a bad sign. Unfortunately for The Bride!, this is just one of those movies where everyone went in with the best of intentions but ended up making something that simply doesn’t work. Maggie Gyllenhaal clearly has some big ideas she wants to convey, but that ambition needs to be channelled properly, otherwise it’ll become unwieldy. This is one of the few times where I’ll take the boring yet faithful adaptation over a ‘throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks’ approach because at least I’ll have something strong enough to cling onto compared to the wispy thin threads being offered up here.