'The Bride!': Jessie Buckley is Electric in Messy, Ambitious Genre Mashup

PHOTO: Warner Bros. Pictures

While there have been many adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there haven’t been very many on-screen portrayals of the Bride of Frankenstein. It could be because there isn’t much to the character in the novel, as she is destroyed before ever being brought to life. The 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein allowed her to take center stage, making her a cinematic icon. Despite this, there’s not as much media representation of the character as one might think. She mainly exists as a reference point, usually with her distinct beehive hairdo, and has only been the main focus of the film she’s in a handful of times. With this limited characterization, a filmmaker could have the freedom to expand on her and explore some interesting territory, much like how other films have with Frankenstein’s original monster for decades.

Enter Maggie Gyllenhaal, fresh off her well-received directorial debut, The Lost Daughter. It is clear that she saw the same potential with the Bride of Frankenstein character as stated above, because that’s what she set out to do with The Bride!, a reimagining of the character that interrogates her existence and gets into similar ideas of creation that can be traced back to Shelley’s original novel. With The Bride!, Gyllenhaal brings up ideas of agency, identity, and feminism, but the whole film doesn’t do much with them, leading it to feel more like a half-baked collection of thoughts than anything else. While it’s hard to deny that the film often looks cool and that Jessie Buckley is quite good, the rest of it is incoherent, underdone, and rather frustrating.

The film begins with a prologue in which Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) vents her frustration with not being able to continue telling the story she began with her landmark novel, Frankenstein. She decides that in order to tell her new story, she must possess a young woman in 1936 Chicago named Ida (also played by Buckley). Shortly thereafter, Ida is killed by a pair of mob henchmen. Meanwhile, Frankenstein’s monster, referred to as “Frank” (Christian Bale) has arrived in Chicago to meet with Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), a scientist who has done extensive work in reanimation. Frank is seeking a female companion, and after some convincing, he and Dr. Euphronius dig up Ida and reanimate her. Frank tells her that she is his Bride and that she lost her memory in an accident. The two then stow away on a train to New York and go on a crime spree, attracting the attention of the law and women who find themselves inspired by The Bride and begin to take action.

I have been all-in on Maggie Gyllenhaal ever since I saw her in the somewhat underrated Stranger Than Fiction, and I was one of the many that saw a lot of promise in her directorial debut. The marketing for The Bride! seemed to signal that this was going to be a leveling up of her skills, giving her a larger budget to play with and allowing her to make something bigger. While I can’t argue that this film is on a much larger scale than The Lost Daughter, it feels like Gyllenhaal might be a bit out of her depth here. On a stylistic level, she succeeds in creating a visually stunning world with great production design and solid cinematography. On the page, however, the film is a mess. There’s no doubt that it is teeming with ideas, it’s just that it can’t seem to settle on a coherent statement to make with them.

This is beyond frustrating because there is so much that the film could be saying. It touches on bodily autonomy, womanhood, misogyny, and identity to name a few, but it’s as if Gyllenhaal threw everything in a blender and turned it into an unidentifiable sludge. This isn’t helped by the numerous genres the film operates in, although I think it is far more successful in its blending of styles than in its thematic exploration. The film is part drama, part romance, and part gangster film, with dashes of dark comedy and musicals for good measure. It is definitely better when in certain genre modes, but the mixture as a whole is still handled clumsily at times. 

Perhaps the most headscratching element of the film is its inclusion of Mary Shelley.

In the film’s prologue, Shelley appears to us in black and white and claims she has another story to tell. If she functioned as a narrator and this was used as a framing device, I might be more forgiving, but this isn’t the end of her. Shelley recurs throughout the movie, largely through dreamlike sequences where she communicates with The Bride. But the character also possesses The Bride, as Jessie Buckley toggles between an English accent and an American one throughout the film. It confuses the narrative, as it feels like a hat on a hat in regards to the film’s ideas on creation and the meaning of one’s existence. The possession element could have been cut entirely and it wouldn’t really change much about the film. I’d like to believe that Gyllenhaal had good reason to put this in the film, but it doesn’t really make a ton of sense in the grand scheme of things. 

At least we get a good Jessie Buckley performance out of the whole thing, as she continues to prove herself as one of our finest living actors. I wouldn’t say this is my favorite of her filmography, but it is still rather strong regardless. Buckley plays the character with rage and erraticism, embodying the energy of what the film seems to be going for. She is the heart of the film and is rather enchanting when she is on the screen. She also has decent chemistry with Christian Bale, and the thread involving their romance is easily one of the strongest aspects of the film. Buckley is undoubtedly the best thing about this film. I just wish that everything else around her was on her level.

As for Bale, he’s fine for the most part, but there really isn’t as much depth to him. Frankly, I could say the same thing for any character that isn’t The Bride. The cast is made up of very talented actors, all of whom I typically like but couldn’t help feeling slighted by in this film. Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, and Penelope Cruz are all okay at the very least, but they lack definition. This is more of a writing issue than an acting issue, but I felt like something was missing from many of the performances. Again, I really feel like Gyllenhaal should have taken another pass at this to flesh certain details out and pare some of it down to be less unwieldy. There’s interesting characters in this film, but none of them really stand out except for The Bride herself.

I had a great deal of optimism going into The Bride!, so it pains me that it ended up being such a mess. I applaud Maggie Gyllenhaal for her ambition, but this film is too scattered and underdeveloped to work the way she intended. I can’t help but wonder if her vision was compromised by Warner Bros., as they did have her cut scenes from the film. But either way, this film is quite a disappointment. It may have some style and a lot on its mind, but it largely comes up empty. There is so much that The Bride! could have said, but try as it might, it ultimately says very little that makes sense.

Rating: 2/5