“The Bride!” is incoherent in narrative, but hits a home run in feminism and female rage

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s take on Mary Shelley’s classic is a messy, yet wonderfully camp addition to the “Frankenverse”

Warning: this review contains spoilers.

If you’re tired of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein tale being adapted, don’t worry — here’s another one. This time, though, it’s not Boris Karloff creating another iconic interpretation of Frankenstein’s monster or Guillermo del Toro’s visually stunning, but not completely accurate love letter to her. It’s a 1930s Chicago meta take on the monster and his bride that also uses Shelley herself as a character. It’s Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!

Those looking for a traditional tale of the Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein stories should sit this one out, because what Gyllenhaal has done here is breathe new life into the monster’s companion and turn the story on its head. While the directing and Buckley’s performance were fantastic, unfortunately, the screenplay was not.

The film first sets the scene for who exactly the Bride is through Mary Shelley herself, played by Buckley. Shelley is inserted into the film as a character, as she tells the audience from the afterlife that she wanted to tell the tale of Frankenstein’s bride, but died before she could. So, Shelley possesses an eccentric woman named Ida (also played by Buckley) living in 1936 Chicago. She has Ida speak about a mob boss and his illegal activities in a crowd, and doing so causes his accomplices to kill her. She is then randomly chosen, dug up and brought back to life as Frankenstein’s monster, a tame movie lover who calls himself Frank (Christian Bale). Frank expresses to Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening) his desire for a companion after over a century of being alone. Ida is under the impression she is Frank’s bride as she has no memories of her life as Ida before she died.

They begin their relationship by seeing a movie starring Frank’s favorite actor, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), and going dancing. When they go to leave, the Bride is harassed by two men whom Frank kills in retaliation. Despite Frank telling the Bride to leave him, she stays, and they go on a runaway adventure filled with chaos, murder and identity-formation. As they continue their crime spree, two detectives, Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz), begin investigating the murders in Chicago and eventually trace them back to the pair, playing a game of catch-up as they try to guess where Frank and the Bride will go next.

Once they reach the duo, realizing that all their crimes are connected to Reed’s movies, Detective Wiles realizes he knows the Bride from her former life as Ida, while Frank admits he did not know her before he and the doctor dug her up. Their actions have also resulted in a nationwide riot (one act of their rebellion including apprehending the mob boss) as women all over find the Bride’s feminist rantings at each of their crime scenes empowering. Shelley also calls on (or possesses) the Bride and speaks to her several times throughout the film, acting as a fourth wall-breaker.

I found the characterization of Shelley to be an unexpected, yet not unwelcome addition to a story like this. Though it doesn’t make total sense to have Shelley the fiction writer in the head of someone interacting with her fictional character in a real-world setting (not to mention the false claim that she was going to write Bride of Frankenstein), I enjoy everything Buckley does so much that this was no exception, and I successfully suspended my disbelief. It shines a rare spotlight on Shelley herself, so I didn’t mind it as much as I probably should have despite some inaccuracies. She acts almost as a rebellious guiding light, at one point asking the Bride where her rage has gone when she’s being assaulted by a police officer.

I loved this choice from Gyllenhaal to, as Pedro Luis Graterol put it, “use the arc of a monster story as a vehicle to showcase female rage as a response to centuries of gender oppression.” The message of gender corruption and women empowerment isn’t subtle. It all but physically beats you over the head, even in the small details like the mad genius doctor being a woman and Jake needing to speak for Myrna to other men on the force despite her doing the heavy lifting in their cases. But at this point, we need characters in the media like this interpretation of Shelley or America Ferrera in Barbie to hammer it into society. We need the painful obviousness if that means people will finally start to listen and recognize these messages for what they are.

Something else I loved was Gyllenhaal’s directing and the overall vision she and her team created with the production design and visual effects. The atmosphere was like The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Lisa Frankenstein, specifically in the choreographed “Puttin’ On the Ritz” dance number reference to Young Frankenstein. Maybe I loved it because I relate to Frank as a fellow introverted movie-loving (and, I’ll be honest, Jake Gyllenhaal-loving) freak, but the real truth is that I will always adore any Fosse-esque routine put in front of me. Chicago? Check. All That Jazz? Check. The Bride and Frank? Check. 

Gyllenhaal knows how to set a scene. This is only her second time directing a feature-length film and, stylistically, she hit a home run. The maximalism worked for me, and it could have been an easy target to turn me off. Fortunately, Buckley’s black tongue and fearless nature, Bale’s off-center portrayal of the monster and the production value output Gyllenhaal provided made me love her even more. The end credits needle drop was “Monster Mash.” This lady rules.

The area Gyllenhaal rules a little less, however, lies in the script — which ultimately makes the movie what it is. Despite me loving Buckley and Bale’s charismatic and courageous performances on-screen both together and apart, I never truly connected with them because the material they were performing was a jumbled mess. There were few times I actually understood the words they were saying, the character development was near-zero and the detective subplot was basically needless because almost no time was spent on Ida and Jake’s intentions with taking down the mob at the beginning. It’s also the Bride’s quest to build her own identity after she finds out she’s not actually a bride and has no memories of her past life, but we still don’t really know her — or Frank, for that matter — by the end. Their wants, needs and desires were all left in the dust. We know neither why movies mean so much to Frank nor a concrete expression of who exactly the Bride decides she wants to be. The story is scared to commit to doing something, even through its dialogue. I didn’t feel anything towards them as they went on their journey, and when I watch a movie, generally I want to bond with the characters. This wasn’t the case for me, and it never felt like there was a complete script.

It has that clear message of gender and female rage it wants to convey, but never finds a cohesive way to do so within the narrative and instead manifests itself in other ways. I appreciated the goofy aspects and that it was “out there,” but it got lost in its own goofiness at times, causing me to unsuccessfully lock into the dialogue and narrative storytelling as a whole, making it hard to follow. Despite me enjoying Shelley’s “presence,” the several moments she called on the Bride’s consciousness and made her spew incoherences for minutes at a time was severely distracting, for example. The detective subplot was not fully explored either, staying shallow and serving as more of a distraction rather than an empowering. It’s chock full of stereotypes and follows the typical sexism routine we usually see rather than getting deeper. Like I said, the female empowerment theme was obvious and beats viewers over the head, but a theme can still be present without stereotyping its own characters.

 We also didn’t spend enough time with Ida before she died or Detective Wiles and their connection, and Cruz’s character seemed to come out of nowhere in this apparent time jump. She is ultimately only used as a surface-level plot device that, really, the film could have gone without given the way it was approached by Gyllenhaal. Compared to the stark contrast of the chaos monster that the Bride is and the havoc she wreaks, the message of how female rage is “best” (for lack of a better word) expressed is incohesive. Should we spill our black-tongued, brazen guts to the masses and declare war on the patriarchy like the Bride, or should we still subtly appeal to men to further our societal agendas in secret like Myrna? It’s always two extremes and never quite pledges what it wants to be. While feminism shouldn’t be one thing, in my opinion, when you pose two separate messages of either appealing to men to eventually achieve a higher feminist power or totally rebel against them to create your own path in the moment, it doesn’t quite add up in the ways it should because they are so contradictory. The message of rebellion against men from the Bride and the one of undermining, but still consulting men in order to “get the job done” under the radar from Myrna don’t mesh. However, I knew what the goal was, and that’s going to have to be a win in itself.

I agree with Graterol’s sentiments: “The Bride! is not lacking in ambition. Gyllenhaal clearly wants to wrestle Mary Shelley’s myth away from its traditional horror roots and reshape it into something stranger, angrier, and more politically charged. There are flashes where that vision briefly comes into focus.”

While I appreciate the attempt to make something different and enjoyed the world-building, using Shelley as a character, feminist take and Gyllenhaal’s directing style, the script, narrative storytelling and dialogue are too wacky for me to fully lean in. There’s a great sort of expression about breaking the norms of what women are often told they “should” be, but it tries to explore so many ideas on top of this that it can’t hold itself up. One could say The Bride! resembles Shelley’s original work, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in the way the script often feels like it’s a bunch of different pieces sewn together, but this film doesn’t quite work in tandem with itself as well as the original and is its own biggest downfall.

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