Here She Comes

There’s something almost admirable about The Bride! — a movie so aggressively weird that you can’t accuse it of playing things safe. Unfortunately, admiration isn’t the same thing as enjoyment. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein riff definitely shows vision. And Jessie Buckley once again proves she’s one of the most interesting actors working today. But the movie itself? It’s a chaotic, overcooked take that’s ultimately more exhausting than entertaining.

First, the basics. The Bride! is a reimagining of James Whale’s 1935 classic Bride of Frankenstein, but transplanted to gritty 1930s Chicago. More than 100 years after his creation (and the events most recently dramatized in Guillermo del Toro’s dark, poetic, emotionally grounded Frankenstein adaptation), Dr. Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) has grown lonely and horny, as he wanders the city masked up to conceal his scars, hiding in the dark and in darkened movie theaters.

Everything changes when, one night, “Frank” asks groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to make him a companion. Together, they dig up and resurrect a murdered young woman named Ida (Buckley, currently Oscar-nominated for Hamnet) — who we meet during a night out at a mobster’s club — who becomes the titular Bride.

From there, the film spirals into a strange mix of romance, crime, and social commentary as the newly revived Bride and the no-longer-lonely monster stumble into a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style partnership while two police detectives (Penelope Cruz and Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard) follow closely on their trail. Through it all, the Bride questions why she exists at all and what she actually wants out of her bizarre second life. 

That premise is actually kinda cool. And to be fair, Gyllenhaal (who directed and wrote the film) clearly has a strong artistic point of view. The movie is stylish, grimy, and full of big swings — an unexpected follow-up to Gyllenhaal’s feature directorial debut, 2021’s much quieter The Lost Daughter, which co-starred Buckley and also featured her Hamnet partner, Paul Mescal, among others.

The Bride! is the kind of studio film that feels personal, which is something to be commended. You can sense Gyllenhaal trying to mash together gothic horror, punk romance, and a meditation on consent and identity.

But wow, does it get messy.

The story wanders all over the place, shifting tones and making weird stylistic detours that swing from the doctor’s lab to an anachronistic rave to a high-society soiree. One minute, The Bride! is a moody monster romance, the next it’s a feminist manifesto (kind of like a female Joker), the next it’s a crime-spree movie reminiscent of, yes, Bonnie and Clyde, then it’s a musical, and then suddenly it’s flirting with surreal art-film territory. Some of it works. A lot of it doesn’t.

One thing that definitely doesn’t is the strange creative choice to have Ida be possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley, the author of the original Frankenstein novel. It blurs the line between creation and reality, and doesn’t make the kind of statement Gyllenhaal probably intends it to make. (Shelley appears in the original Bride movie, but not like this.)

Equally distracting is what a family affair the movie is: In addition to Sarsgaard, Maggie also cast her brother Jake Gyllenhaal as a singing and dancing matinee idol that Frank, well, idolizes. It’s nice to see them all working together, but it kinda takes you out of the action whenever these two men are on screen. (Not that Cruz’s performance helps, either.)

Buckley, though, is reliably excellent. She throws herself into the role with feral, electric energy, bringing intensity and unpredictability to the Bride. Watching her stomp through the movie with wild hair and blackened tongue is easily the best part of the experience. If The Bride! becomes a cult film someday, it’ll be because of her.

In James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, the Bride appears for only a few minutes, near the end. She doesn’t have any dialogue. In fact, when the Monster approaches her and says “Friend?”, the Bride (memorably and iconically played by Elsa Lanchester) reacts by screaming and rejecting him rather than speaking. 

The Bride! made me want to scream. Despite Buckley’s good performance and Gyllenhaal’s bold ideas, the film is a misfire. It’s the kind of work that sounds good in theory — let’s put one of today’s best actresses in a midnight creature feature alongside Christian Bale and tell her to go nuts — but sitting through it feels like being trapped inside a very strange dream.

I’m giving The Bride! a C.