You know, I was pulling for this one. I think Maggie Gyllenhaal had shown some competency as a director with The Lost Daughter from a few years back. I’m a big Jessie Buckley fan, a big Christian Bale fan and a big fan of movies that just say f*ck you and go balls to the wall mad. That’s what I anticipated The Bride! to be based on the trailers, and believe it or not, it was one of my most anticipated movies of the year. A Bonnie and Clyde-style story with two of the most famous movie monsters of all time? Right here, please. But this is not that. In fact, I don’t really know what this is. All I know is that it’s bad, and that makes me sad.

The Bride! is a scattershot of ideas and reimaginings that never truly came together to make something truly provocative or, at the very least, entertaining. Terrific actors like Buckley and Bale are forced to combat with a script that acts like it has so much to say but never intends on being totally coherent with its intentions. It’s certainly not boring, thanks in part to an admittedly fun visual style, but I can’t say I was really enjoying my time with it either. And the thing is this had full range to do what it wanted with the established characters and history of the novel, and yet its perceived reflections of Mary Shelly’s work not only feel misused, but just plain wrong. There’s something of substance here, but it gets buried under too many baffling decisions that ultimately drown this film. There might be more to unearth from it, but at this point, you’re better left just leaving it at the altar.

Set in the 1930s, a woman named Ida is killed by the mob when she tries to make the bosses’ crimes known. She ends up being revived by Frankenstein’s monster and a local scientist in order to give the monster the companionship he never had for over a century. Bonded by their undead physiology and their shunning from society, the two embark on a destructive spree across the country, intent on living the life they were never meant to have.

I think the thing about this that hurt the most was seeing Jesse Buckley in a truly bad role. I don’t think Buckley is entirely to blame, as I truly believe she was handed a role that was designed to not work. Buckley actually plays two characters, the titular Bride and the ghost of Mary Shelley. Yes, the spirit of the author of Frankenstein possesses her in order to, in her words, create the sequel to her novel she was never able to make. What that essentially entails is Buckley portraying someone with a split personality, and one of those personalities only wants to speak like they have a case of mid-Atlantic tourettes. When Buckley is allowed to just be The Bride, I actually think her performance is quite good, tapping into the rage of being unheard and being an afterthought. It’s these interjections from Mary Shelley that not only becomes grating on the ears, but her delivery is sometimes borderline incomprehensible. This really muddies what her intentions are, and what I gathered is kinda questionable. Shelley essentially is made out to be this witch that gets a woman killed so she can essentially turn her into a monster. Not only does this just feel like weak characterization, it also acts like it’s giving Shelley agency over the legacy of Frankenstein. I could see that being an interesting idea if it went a certain way, but it just reads like a misunderstanding of Shelley’s work as a whole, but we’ll talk more about that later.

Christian Bale comes out a little cleaner in this, but not by much. No surprise here, but Bale really nails the physicality of a role like this. He’s obviously drawing a lot from Boris Karloff, hell, even a little bit of Peter Boyle. I do feel like we don’t get nearly enough of the inner workings of his intentions. We know he’s lonely and wants a bride, but we don’t really get too much deeper than that. Does he want a bride truly because he’s looking for love, or because he feels he’s entitled to it as many men believed back in that era? These kinds of things would have added a bit more layers to him, but the film struggles to truly characterize him outside of the typical ostracizing you’d expect from a Frankenstein film. He’s lying to Buckley’s character, convincing her she was engaged to him before her death, and the film doesn’t really do enough to villainize him or even generate some moderate sympathy for him. It makes an otherwise complex relationship just feel half-baked at the end of the day. He does nearly die if he doesn’t go to see a movie enough, so I can’t say he’s not relatable. 

And that’s a bit of a trend with this movie; it presents ideas that it only seems to go halfway on. Like I said before, the whole Mary Shelly thing doesn’t really seem to have a lot of depth to it, but it does seem to feed into this feminist, empowering narrative that lurks in the background of this film. There’s a point where this thing legit becomes Joker, as women around the city rise up, painted as the Bride to do…something. This idea gets presented and that has practically no impact on the rest of the story. We don’t see the city change or even really understand what the “movement” means to others. Perhaps the strongest thematic element to this film revolves around Frank who has an obsession with cinema. He uses  it as a guiding light to frame his expectations for life without realizing it’s a romanticized reflection of life itself. A great idea, but one that doesn’t always feel like it’s adding more depth to the character than it thinks. Ironically enough, this thing often feels like a stitched together hodgepodge of ideas, which…I guess makes it authentically Frankenstein.

I will say that this thing is presented in the kind of chaotic, slapshot way that I really appreciate. In a film of big swings, the visuals are perhaps the element that pays off the most. There’s a lot of interesting choices in colors and framing here that’s really splendid, really capturing a gothic noir aesthetic that’s a lot of fun to see at times. It’s aggressive and a bit sloppy at times, but I think it fits right at home with what the film is trying to present. Now, if only the script could have done the same. I’ll give it credit, there are some interesting ideas, concepts and recontextualizations of the original novel that makes this thing far from being pointless or without merit. But intention is not the same thing as execution. The way it approaches some of these themes feels incredibly underdeveloped. The “movement” the Bride ignites amongst scorned women is an afterthought for most of the movie. The side plot revolving around two detectives hunting down the monsters is boring and grinds the film to a halt whenever it cuts to them. This worked best when it was a silly, slightly poignant monster movie romp. The dance number and the citizens of Chicago literally chasing the monsters with pitchforks and torches are goofy, but they might have been what the movie needed more of, especially with how weak this feminist narrative turns out to be.

And that’s what kind of bugged me the most. This film almost kind of frames the story around Frankenstein finally getting a woman’s voice behind it, seemingly forgetting it was written by a woman. The text of the original Frankenstein is incredibly feminist in how it portrays creating and nurturing life, and I don’t think it necessarily needed Mary Shelly returning from the dead to reclaim the narrative. Maybe this was trying to bring those feminist elements of the story back into the forefront, but this just wasn’t the way to do it in my eyes. While The Bride! is bold in execution, the final result ends up being a stylish but rather empty take on the classic monsters. Things like the character of the Bride and the weak, surface-level approaches to female struggles keeps this from being the quirky genre film it was probably meant to be. Never thought I’d be saying these words, but it’s no Lisa Frankenstein. Even still, this is far from the worst thing ever as some people on line have labeled it. Believe it or not, I want more movies like this. I’d rather a bold attempt crash and burn than have a corporately produced piece of content give you everything you think you want. Men make confusing, baffling misfires all the time. It’s only fair that women get in on the fun as well.

RATING

THE RE-INVIGORATOR

Sometimes we need a little jolt to get us up and moving, whether it be because we’re tired or we just had our neck snapped. That was my idea for the Reinvigorator, but I also wanted it to have the aesthetic of the titular bride. So this will be a dark coffee cocktail that we’ll combine with a little fruit and a big head of whip cream to mimic the Bride’s crazy hair. But this is definitely a drink for the living, so mind the Wu-Tang Clan and protect ya neck.

INGREDIENTS

• 2oz dark rum
• 1oz coffee liqueur
• 8-10 blueberries
• 1/2oz lemon juice
• pinch of black sugar
• Top: whipped cream

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Add ingredients to a shaker and shake with ice.
2. Double strain into chilled cocktail glass.
3. Top with a swirl of whipped cream.