3.5 out of 5 stars (above average)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a very important novel to me. It got me into sci-fi and horror from a young age, I wrote a 25-page essay on it in college, and I’ve seen adaptations soar and fall in equal measure. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! Is not an adaptation of that book, but a dark, campy, oddly romantic continuation of the story that respects and understands and respects Shelley’s original themes while spinning a story all its own. It certainly won’t work for everyone, but I’m glad I walked down the cinematic aisle with it.
1936: Although her novel Frankenstein was a smashing success, the ghost of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) is miffed about being dead in the ground. She possesses a young woman called Ida (Also Buckley), whose rowdy attitude and the skeeviness of the men in her purview gets her killed. Elsewhere, Frankenstein’s Monster (Frank for short) (Christian Bale) has spent the intervening years lonely and seeking a bride of his own. He enlists the help of mad scientist Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening) to help him reanimate a dead body, that being Ida, only to discover her corpse is a wild child not interested in settling down and unaware of who she was. As the two connect and start exploring the world together, Ida’s rage at the world’s mistreatment of women grows, causing her and Frank to go on a crime spree of vengeance. Pursued by Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his whipsmart assistant Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz), our 2 monsters will try to find love and peace in a world that fears their existence.
The Bride! Is currently tanking at the global box office, and while I understand it certainly won’t be for everyone, I Know there’s an audience for it. Director Maggie Gyllenhaal has a confident command of the film’s tone, navigating moments of odd sweetness, gore, camp, and sadness over the story and ensuring her cast hits the right pitch of performance throughout. Jessie Buckley is a rising star and recent Oscar winner and this makes it easy to see why: She knows when to go bombastic with her performance, when to go smaller, and when to tap into her character’s humanity while not becoming overbearing to us. Christian Bale is similarly strong here and balances sympathy with monstrousness. This could have fallen flat with the wrong actors, but Buckley and Bale are a complimentary double act that both get chances to shine.
Thematically, The Bride! continues some of the ideas of Shelley’s original story (I.E. Who are the monsters of society, who is deemed a monster, and how does that society react to them) while adding a few of its own: Embracing your inner self, anger at the mistreatment of women, and, surprisingly, how the movies can move and influence us for the better. This is a Frankenstein who finds solace at the cinema and his lover who learns who she is on her own terms, practically making it a movie after my own heart. Some story ideas aren’t explored to their fullest (particularly a crime subplot and a revolution of sorts are oddly pushed to the background) and the stylistic flourishes may be off-putting to some, but for me, this was a story of 2 outcasts who found connection with each other in a world that doesn’t understand them, just with some gore, tonal shifts, and a sex drive. It’s a big swing of weird that won’t work for everyone, but it did for me. The Bride! is a dark, campy, and romantic continuation of a classic story that doesn’t reach the same level as its progenitor, but comes alive in its own way. If you like weird stuff, definitely check this out in a theater near you while you can.
Rated R for Strong/Bloody Violent Content, Sexual Content/Nudity, and Language