In some alternate universe, there’s probably a simpler, more straightforward version of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein spin-off movie The Bride! that’s currently getting called a must-see crowd-pleaser romance. You can see the bones of that movie in our universe’s version of the film. Stripped down to its core elements, The Bride! has all the makings of a dark, spooky, feel-good Bonnie and Clyde road movie, where Frankenstein’s lonely, hideous monster gets the companion of his dreams, and they try to survive together in an unfriendly world that’s all too eager to slap the “monster” label on outsiders, rebels, and anyone who resists the status quo.
Gyllenhaal has much more complicated aims. Her version of The Bride! is much harder to parse, and much harder to swallow. It’s a provocation and a challenge — a movie designed to prickle and puzzle the brain more than warm the heart. At times, the story’s layers get in the way of its more gut-level pleasures, but it’s clear that’s intentional. It isn’t always obvious what Gyllenhaal wants viewers to get out of The Bride!, but it’s obvious she’s comfortable making them work for it.
Jessie Buckley — who also co-starred in Gyllenhaal’s one previous directorial project, 2021’s Oscar-nominated drama The Lost Daughter — stars here as Ida, a woman first seen partying with gangsters in 1936 Chicago. Ida has an agenda that doesn’t become clear until the end of the movie, and it’s particularly unclear in The Bride!’s early going because, before the audience learns anything about her, she’s seemingly possessed by the spirit of Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (also played by Buckley). Mary speaks directly to the audience from limbo and claims she wants to write a much scarier sequel to Frankenstein, a story she wasn’t allowed to tell. She also speaks and acts through Ida, driving her to provocative, frightening behavior that rapidly gets her killed.
Ida soon reappears in the laboratory of mad scientist Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who exhumes her corpse and revives her as a mate for Frankenstein’s monster, mostly referred to as “Frank” and played by Christian Bale under a ton of disturbing stitched-together-corpse makeup. In this setting, Frank’s creator, Victor Frankenstein, was a pioneer in the art of dead-tissue revival; Dr. Euphronius studied, admired, and emulated his work. When Frank comes to her complaining of his loneliness and requesting a companion, Dr. Euphronius only puts up token resistance before agreeing to dig up a corpse and zap it back to life.
Some of what follows is a bit too familiar from Yorgos Lanthimos’ recent movie Poor Things, an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s wild fantasy novel about a different mad scientist who revives a different dead woman he seemingly hopes will be a tractable, attractive companion. Like Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) in Lanthimos’ movie, the revived Ida is more interested in pursuing her own pleasures than in settling in as Frank’s made-to-order wife. While Ida doesn’t remember her past, she still has some of her old drives toward nightclubs, parties, and dancing. Her immediate pursuit of hedonism ends in disaster and puts her on the run with Frank, who hopes she’ll come to love him.
Both versions of Poor Things (though it’s even more pronounced in the book) come with a strong, clear message about women’s agency, particularly in scenarios where men expect them not to have any. The Bride! takes up some of that message, but immediately complicates it with weird events and a twisty series of reversals, as Ida’s personality ricochets around from scene to scene. Mary continues to possess her on and off, generally to unclear ends. She seems to want to drive the story to dramatic places, but her interference is erratic, random, and puckish more than driven. As The Bride! morphs into a dark love-on-the-run story, it becomes increasingly unclear where an author literally in limbo fits into the mix.
Some of these ideas come directly from James Whale’s 1935 movie Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel to his 1931 film Frankenstein, which gave American cinema most of its ideas about how Frankenstein’s monster (played by Boris Karloff) should look and sound. Bride of Frankenstein is also framed by a scene where Mary Shelley promises a sequel to her novel, and it also eventually leads to a newly made bride for the titular monster rejecting him in horror. That film’s influence is clearly seen here in the character designs as well, particularly in Buckley’s fright-wig hair and dramatic makeup.
But Mary Shelley opens Bride of Frankenstein by explaining to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their friend Lord Byron that Frankenstein is a moral fable about how mere mortals shouldn’t play God. The Bride! never finds that level of clarity.
Frank, in particular, never fully comes into focus as anything but a lovelorn foil to Ida, in spite of all the details the movie packs onto him. He isn’t the powerful, intellectual outcast of Shelley’s real-life novel, the guttural Boris Karloff monster of Whale’s films, or the more complicated creature that creators like Guillermo del Toro have made him. Bale plays him as a socially awkward dummy desperate for touch and recognition. He capable of mildly sophisticated conversation when he’s pleading his case to Dr. Euphronius, but reduced to fumbling incoherence and jealous rages around Ida. It rarely seems like he has anything much to offer a partner, except dumb, dogged dedication and an animal viciousness toward anyone who threatens her.
Buckley sells Ida’s soulfulness and appeal more handily, but the character’s memory lapses, periodic possession, and emotional instability make her so erratic, it’s hard to find the character at her heart, or feel a clear rooting sense of interest in any one impulse that directs her. On her revivification, Ida coughs up black goo that stains her lips, cheek, and body, giving her a distinctive look. Later, as her aggressive iconoclasm makes waves across the country, other women emulate that look and she becomes a kind of societally disruptive monster fashion icon in Lady Gaga mode. That’s a strong idea that Gyllenhaal expresses through memorable visuals and moments — but it’s a small, thin thread compared to Ida and Frank’s on-again-off-again love story and cross-country crime spree.
Other storylines further complicate The Bride!, including detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his far smarter secretary Myrna (Penélope Cruz) chasing Frank and Ida around the country. These two seem dropped in from their own procedural series: Myrna makes it clear she’s been solving crimes that Jake takes credit for because he’s a man. Their push-and-pull relationship as she tries to get respect and recognition for her skills is a loose parallel to Frank and Ida’s relationship, as Ida tries to find or create her own identity.
And then there’s an entire sideline in Frank’s obsession with cinematic superstar Ronnie Reed (Gyllenhaal’s brother Jake, in a small but crucial role that makes the most of his charisma). Frank’s obsession with cinema repeatedly takes The Bride! into theaters, where he and Ida either watch Ronnie sing, dance, and play out sleek love stories, or project themselves onto the screen to experience those things for themselves. That plotline leads to a particularly wild musical sequence where Gyllenhaal openly references Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. At the same time, she gives The Bride! a level of surreal, manic glitz that elevates it into a fantasy realm, where all the other elements fit together just a little more smoothly.
Still, it’s hard to shake the sensation that there are too many moving pieces grinding and clashing against each other in The Bride! to let any one aspect fully stand out. The most obvious linking factor is the sense of a chaotic, frustrated, rage-driven commentary about the predatory challenges women face. Ida’s fierce resistance against being packaged as Frankie’s wife, the gangster plotline that leads to her original death, the two different incidents of sexual violence she faces throughout the film, and her recognition as an aspirational figure all speak to how often women are pushed into roles as prey, patsies, or possessions — and then demonized when they resist those roles. Myrna’s attempts to get her skills rather than her sex recognized speak to that theme too.
But Ida and Frank’s sometimes-weird, sometimes-sweet, sometimes-violent romance never fully jibes with those ideas, and rarely has enough consistency or energy of its own to stand as a thread either linking them, or in opposition to them. Neither does Mary Shelley’s presence throughout the film. This movie is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from a thousand different parts and lurching into disturbing life. The Bride! seems like it was meant to be discussed, analyzed, and unpacked at length, with different fans seizing on different elements as the key to the whole shambling creature. But like so many of the Frankensteinian creatures that preceded it onto the screen, it’s a bit of an unwieldy monster.
The Bride! opens in theaters on March 6.
