The Bride Review: Messy, But Occasionally Brilliant

PLOT: After being murdered, a gangster’s moll, Ida (Jessie Buckley), is brought back to life by the brilliant Dr. Euphonious (Annette Bening) at the behest of Frankenstein’s monster, aka Frank (Christian Bale), who’s looking for a companion.

REVIEW: The Bride (or rather The Bride!) is The Lost Daughter director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s highly ambitious take on the 1935 sequel to Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, centering on the mute character from James Whale’s classic Universal Monsters film (she doesn’t actually ever come to life in Mary Shelley’s book). This actually isn’t the first modern movie centered around the character, with it having inspired a little-remembered 1985 film, also called The Bride, which starred Jennifer Beals, Clancy Brown (as the monster), and Sting as Dr. Frankenstein — not that anyone remembers.

It comes along at perhaps a bad moment, with it having to exist in the shadow of Guillermo del Toro’s recent Frankenstein, which is up for a slew of Oscars this year. Yet, anyone fearful of another take on that familiar story need not worry, as Gyllenhaal’s movie does its own thing — quite radically. It doesn’t always work, with it being a bit of a mess more often than not, but at times it’s a pretty dazzling spectacle.

The film is set in a deliberately anachronistic 1930s-era Chicago, with it home to bootleggers and gangsters, but also goth clubs where bands like Fever Ray play neon-lit raves. In terms of visuals and style, The Bride is a triumph. Gyllenhaal has built a unique world for Jessie Buckley’s Bride and Christian Bale’s Frank to inhabit, with dazzling production design and razor-sharp cinematography by Lawrence Sher.

The performances all swing for the fences, with Buckley’s work here an interesting contrast to her Oscar-nominated turn in Hamnet. That movie was about nuance; this is maximalist, ear-shattering rage from start to finish. In fact, the film plays more like a horror take on Bonnie & Clyde meets Sid & Nancy rather than a Frankenstein movie, with Christian Bale’s Frank a kindly, lovesick guy who’s sensitive — even if he won’t hesitate to cave in the occasional face or two. Buckley is dialed up to eleven, while Bale is her low-key foil.

It’s too bad that Gyllenhaal’s screenplay feels a bit too much like a hodgepodge of ideas, many of which don’t work. The idea to have The Bride occasionally possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley (also played by Buckley), who also breaks in now and then as a narrator, is very gimmicky and takes away from Ida/The Bride’s character arc, sending the movie off on tangents that are more confusing than gripping.

The influence of Todd Phillips’s Joker is also palpable, with the film not only using the same DP (Sher) and composer (Hildur Guðnadóttir), but also a producer — Emma Tillinger Koskoff. It feels like the movie must have been pitched as Frankenstein meets Joker when that was still fashionable (the film was already well underway when Joker: Folie à Deux flopped), and it covers a bit too much of the same ground, with The Bride influencing women all over the world the film is set in to rise up, give themselves the black facial mark the Bride has, and murder men.

It feels like this notion was just tacked on, with it never really paying off. Some of the dialogue is also a bit too on the nose. While it’s definitely a feminist take on the genre, having The Bride literally yell out “Me Too” has the subtlety of a jackhammer.

The film is also overloaded with characters who distract from the Bride/Frank dynamic, specifically Peter Sarsgaard as a lazy detective and Penélope Cruz as his brainy secretary, who’s the real sleuth of the pair. A lot of time is spent on them, but they feel like they walked in from another movie, and whenever we leave The Bride and Frank, the film grinds to a halt.

Yet, there are some inspired casting choices, with Jake Gyllenhaal having a fun role as the Fred Astaire–style movie star that Frank idolizes, with him even leading a few full-on musical numbers. Oddly enough, of all the Frankenstein movies Maggie Gyllenhaal seems to be pulling from, the one she references the most is Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, with Bale’s Frank shouting out “Puttin’ on the Ritz!”

Much has been written about how the theatrical cut of The Bride took some time to come together, and it has the feel of a movie that’s been edited down. It’s uneven, at times frustratingly bad, but then at others it’s absolutely riveting. Regardless of whether or not The Bride goes down as a failure or a success (it will almost certainly become a cult movie), there’s no denying that Gyllenhaal has serious chops behind the camera and is a rising talent as a director.

The Bride is a movie that I loved at times and disliked at others. Is it actually great? No. But it has more than a few moments of brilliance within it, and at its worst it’s never dull.