Johanna Fateman
It’s alive! Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Bride of Frankenstein reboot is a stupefying series of almost-good ideas.
Christian Bale as Frank and Jessie Buckley as The Bride in The Bride! Photo: Niko Tavernise. © Warner Bros. Ent.
The Bride!, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal,
now playing in theaters
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A Bride of Frankenstein reboot imagined as a body-horror Bonnie and Clyde, intercut with monologues from a distraught Mary Shelley, featuring two new tracks by Fever Ray and an all-star cast, looks like a great idea on paper. Or does it? The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s visually lavish and relentlessly intertextual sophomore directorial effort, which follows her 2021 adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, is quite something. It really is a lot of things.
Jessie Buckley as The Bride in The Bride! Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. © Warner Bros. Ent.
Jessie Buckley stars as both Shelley (author of the 1818 urtext Frankenstein), who speaks, sweating, from a purgatorial chiaroscuro realm in an energetic mix of bawdy wordplay, polemic, and invective—I’m not sure why—and Ida, a woman in 1936 Chicago who, after a lethal tumble down a long staircase, is “reinvigorated” to wed Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), hereafter referred to as “Frank.” A confounding, and unfortunately defining, narrative element of the film is Shelley’s intermittent possession of Ida’s body, so that Buckley very frequently appears to short-circuit, jerking and shouting with a hearty, drama-club British accent.
Christian Bale as Frank in The Bride! Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. © Warner Bros. Ent.
That the Bride (as she ultimately names herself) should serve as Shelley’s mortal-monster surrogate for her unfinished feminist business seems a superfluous premise, given that Ida, we learn almost immediately, has her own personal and political scores to settle in the land of the living. Granted, it is in large part the Gothic writer’s outbursts—which manifest as Ida’s stylized malfunctions—as well as her expansive vocabulary, that Frank, an awkward-hot, square-skulled monster with unhealed sutures and a classic line of heavy-gauge staples below his hairline, finds so irresistible.
Annette Bening as Dr. Euphronious, Christian Bale as Frank, and Jessie Buckley as The Bride in The Bride! Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. © Warner Bros. Ent.
He’s no Weird Science incel looking for an animatronic-cadaver sex doll, as Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) first suspects when he turns up at her Gotham City–Wiener Werkstätte–style live-work institute—not exactly. Persuaded by his acute and long-standing loneliness, weakened by his appeals to her professional vanity, and physically frightened, she agrees to dig up a corpse with him. Together, in a campy sci-fi lab procedure more or less faithful to the portrayal of electrocution-based reanimation in James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, they resurrect Ida and tell her—she remembers nothing of her life (or death) initially—that, before “the accident,” she was engaged to Frank.
Christian Bale as Frank and Jessie Buckley as The Bride in The Bride! Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. © Warner Bros. Ent.
There’s no getting around the depraved misogyny of conscripting a corpse and deceiving an amnesiac into a wifely role. So, Ida’s liberation, as well as Frank’s (as a born-from-the-dead freak with a heart of gold), takes place not thanks to the fucked-up if visionary, radical-in-her-own-way doctor, but instead on the road. Ida and Frank are in some sense less like Bonnie and Clyde than a neo-noir Thelma and Louise; their love story works—if anything here can be said to work—because Frank is fundamentally gentle and fun but kills rapists, a behavior that both propels the plot and dooms him. When the couple sneaks out of Euphronious’s place and drops in at a Weimar cabaret–type situation by the train tracks, where Ida’s graveyard-punk sprezzatura and party-girl muscle memory come into view on the dance floor (Karin Dreijer of Fever Ray appears as a steampunk Joker performing on stage), things end poorly. A pair of young men harass and grope Ida at the party, then follow her and Frank as they try to leave. Fatally underestimating the conflict-avoidant Frank, the thugs rough him up and continue their assault on Ida until he snaps and smashes them to death. Captured by a crime-scene flash photographer as they flee, they’re now on the lam.
Peter Sarsgaard as Jake Wiles and Penélope Cruz as Myrna Mallow in The Bride! Photo: Niko Tavernise. © Warner Bros. Ent.
By the time we encounter Detective Jake Wiles (played by Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard) and his girl Friday, Myrna (Penélope Cruz), who will pursue the monsters and, in Myrna’s case, unravel the conspiracy of dirty cops and a mob boss responsible for a spate of killings, the film already has too much on its plate. More than enough backstory to work through, a superabundance of characters. Gyllenhaal herself, it seems, cannot stop digging for parts to reinvigorate, splicing together genre tropes and scattering unsubtle Easter eggs for film buffs everywhere. I haven’t even mentioned Frank’s love for the Fred Astaire–based star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal, the director’s brother), an obsession that draws him regularly to movie theaters (and one drive-in) where, in recurring fantasy sequences, he projects himself into dance numbers.
Christian Bale as Frank and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ronnie Reed in The Bride! Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. © Warner Bros. Ent.
This isn’t terrible, I guess, but it’s difficult to say what it achieves in terms of Frank’s character development, and, as a motif in a cluttered timeline, it seems to culminate rather too early in the story: he breaks into an MGM-musical-style production of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (Gyllenhaal’s homage to Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle’s performance in the 1974 horror-comedy Young Frankenstein) as a prelude to a pivotal shoot-out and hostage situation in a hotel ballroom. There, an armed Ida/Shelley delivers a fateful monologue, narrating her clairvoyant contact with murdered women, establishing Frank and herself as folk heroes, and inspiring a wave of women vigilante copycats (hashtag the dead are angry).
Christian Bale as Frank and Jessie Buckley as The Bride in The Bride! Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. © Warner Bros. Ent.
That underbaked proto-punk social movement/fad, depicted briefly in an entirely dispensable montage, is especially dispiriting. But, in truth, the entire movie proceeds as a stupefying series of missed opportunities and almost-good ideas. There’s a scene on a country road (the lovers are headed to Niagara Falls) in which Ida chews off the tongue of a dying cop as Frank looks on. What might be a refreshingly un-generic and symbolically potent act of gruesome mutilation is rather unremarkable because Ida’s been glitching out and losing her shit for so long that by now it doesn’t matter; the grisly impulse and its particular significance barely register. In the final third of The Bride!, nothing much does, and it’s tediously clear that everything is, in the end, going to be just fine. That’s a shame: monsters, rape-revenge, a nineteenth-century woman writer—I really mean it when I say that I would absolutely love this movie if everything about it were different.
Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, and co-chief art critic for CULTURED magazine in New York.