Here Comes 'The Bride!' Revived to Be Fried!
- August Hammel
- 38 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Jumping straight from independent filmmaking into the studio system is a tall order, even for an industry veteran like Maggie Gyllenhaal. The risk is high, the reward is higher, but the fall could be steeper than either. After making her feature directorial debut with 2021’s sublime The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal is back as the writer, director, and producer of a go-for-broke reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein by way of Sid and Nancy. Scaling up in scope and size from her debut, The Bride! is one hell of a way to go about a sophomore slump.
Swinging for the fences and the parking lot behind the bleachers, Gyllenhaal’s new take on James Whale’s classic gives agency to the titular Bride in a way that film never did. For all the iconography of the 1935 film, Elsa Lanchester’s original bride barely has any screentime nor dialogue. Beyond the stark streak of white hair and bulging her enormous eyes, Lanchester’s Bride had little to do and even less to say. Director Bill Condon had long desired to properly remake the film in classic fashion, his obsession more than apparent with his Gods and Monsters, but his version was called off in 2024.
Gyllenhaal’s take is more radical. She takes the bones of Mary Shelley’s original novel and Whale’s films and throws them in a blender alongside dollops of Golden Age Hollywood romanticism, grungy Britpunk sheen, and half-baked mid-2010s era pull-quote feminism, but with some hall of fame-worthy character names. In its final form, Gyllenhaal’s concoction is a unique, unwieldy beast of a movie that can rarely support its own ambitions – which are, frankly, indiscernible.
The Bride! follows a nearly 100-year-old Frankenstein (Christian Bale), the scientist’s creature who has adopted his creator’s name, as he travels to 1930s Chicago in search of Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening). He has a humble request: make him a bride. Ida (Jessie Buckley), a woman with mysterious connections to the local Lupino mob, has just broken her neck in a fall of foul play. Once reanimated and acquainted with her betrothed, a notion she has some choice words for, she proves to be a verbose firecracker painted as a gun moll with a lust for life. Ida’s second chance at life soon becomes defined by chaos as the duo leave a trail of blood across the country, trailed by Detectives Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), alongside Lupino thugs on their tail.
To spoil The Bride! is nigh impossible as there is little semblance of a sensible plot. Held together with surgical string using unspecified black bile as the glue, Gyllenhaal’s vision plays with scale and a combination of period iconographies, attempting to make up for its intangible narrative with immense production value and gloriously gaudy spectacle. While mostly a feast, it’s an overwhelming and cacophonous one that often rings hollow as Gyllenhaal plunders through each moment in search of a lucid story.
From the get, there’s little to hold onto besides an intimation of audacity. Hyperactive edits between Buckley as a black & white, stuck-between-realities Mary Shelley and Buckley as Ida – seemingly possessed by some ethereal version of the former – certainly disorient, which seems to be the goal. Yet, crucially, nothing ever intrigues or tantalizes. Keeping your cards close to your chest could evoke mystery, but Gyllenhaal never actually plays a hand. After Ida is resurrected into the erratic, bungled Bride, she and Frank wind up on a Bonnie & Clyde-esque mission – rather than choosing to chase one – in which neither emotion nor narrative peel through the film’s fog of convolution.
Rage and fury read palpably in Buckley’s performance and Gyllenhaal’s direction, but they’re at odds. As a woman reanimated by dark and incandescent science, the Bride carries eerie energy into her new life. Smeared with black bile and rocking a shock-white mane, she barges through every scene, and her manic energy should match what Gyllenhaal is aiming for – but their energies feel like opposing magnets rather than twin flames. Gyllenhaal’s direction is harried, as is Buckley’s turn, but her performance is more a full-throated attack than the scattershot direction and the two end up at odds.
There’s a mania to the film’s rhythm, hammered home by an admirable punk rock streak (unmistakably conveyed by direct references to the Violent Femmes and riot grrrl alongside a brief Fever Ray appearance), but the jeering ecstasy is all for naught; Buckley’s performance registers more as a one-woman-show Broadway event than as a cinematic character. The Bride’s post-resurrection tics include sudden outbursts of synonymy and wordplay, which she delivers in a British alter-ego – apparently under some influence of the Shelley from the ether. This, in contrast to her more common register of a tough-talking Chicago dame, makes for frequent cinematic whiplash; all switch-ups bounce off the backboard.
Buckley lunges at the role, but the connection with Bale’s more open-wounded Frank never sparks beyond the two performers’ shared love of full commitment to the bit, as the latter is going just as big and hammy without ever connecting to the already lacking material. The duo only really make magic when Gyllenhaal fully picks a lane; the most successful is anachronistic playfulness. During the duo’s dreamland musical number after meeting Frank’s favorite Fred Astaire-ish movie star, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), the movie seems to find its soul and Buckley and Bale ride the wave.
Still, the film’s imbalance between melodramatic romance and Terry Gilliam-by-way-of-Todd Phillips dysfunction means that the two blustering performers rarely hold steady. Sarsgaard and Cruz get away clean, with their calmer pairing making for mildly delightful scenes, especially as the former channels Denis Leary in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). Their more grounded dynamic is still laden with on-the-nose and empty aphorisms that gesture toward a revolutionary feminist fire but rarely bear much consequence or thematic weight beyond a surface level agreeability. It’s this vague gesturing toward theme that plagues the film in its entirety. The Bride! is a hodgepodge of ideas that never paint a picture.
Navigating The Bride’s fury at the misogyny that killed her and other women is interesting, as is exposing a dark mob’s various evil-doings toward women (as is interrogating a quasi-revolution started by The Bride’s antics, or the issue of consent inherent to the Frankenstein story), but, unfortunately, none of these threads coalesce or are animated with any life after being exhumed. The aesthetic joys of mixing punk with classic Hollywood are undeniable and Sandy Powell deserves yet another Oscar for her singular ability to turn a silhouette into an icon, but there’s no glue.
Clarity drives Gyllenhaal’s intimate, hand-held closeups on her performers with the size of a certified IMAX frame, but that crisp imagery never translates into a deeper picture. It’s especially disappointing after The Lost Daughter, when audiences witnessed Gyllenhaal’s preternatural knack for nuanced observation of the slightest obsessions and grandest delusions that The Bride! barely contains a cohesive scene. Even if there’s an odor of studio interference about the affair, which there is, the foundations here still shake more than The Bride’s ecstatic dancing.
The Bride! is a captivating nonstarter. Studio films in the mid-2020s are often bad – this is no shock – but they’re rarely this shaggy. In Gyllenhaal’s spectacle, there’s real charm to be found within the chasms. Big swings are rarely taken at this level of filmmaking and they rarely get to look or sound this sumptuous. That the film never finds its footing is tragic, but the scavenging is still a hell of a show.
The Bride! opens in theaters everywhere March 6.
-August
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