‘The Bride!’ Review – A True Frankenstein of a Film That Wants to be a Cult Classic
Yeah, I stayed away from this one as long as I could until curiosity got the better of me, and I’ll be honest: Based on what I saw and how the film performed, I was afraid of this. After the numbers rolled in, it was impossible not to feel a sense of déjà vu. The Bride! became the latest victim of Warner Bros.’s March gamble. It’s another high-concept swing – the second after Mickey 17 – to find itself let loose on the villagers in early spring, only to be ignored (not a torch or pitchfork in sight).
The studio seems to have a recurring dream of releasing a would-be cerebral “auteur-driven” genre piece and expecting it to behave like a blockbuster. But just as Mickey 17 (and 18) couldn’t be saved by critical acclaim, The Bride! bled out on the table at the box office. It’s a tragedy, really, of timing and temperament; both films are too weird for your average popcorn muncher, and too expensive to be cult curiosities.
I foresaw a repeat of this time last year, and boy, was I proven right!
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut attempts to retell that old yarn, The Bride of Frankenstein, except without any of the self-control of James Whale, as if it were spun by the ghost of Mary Shelley herself. I’m not kidding – the ghost of the Romantic author (Jessie Buckley working double overtime) narrates, and even haunts, the proceedings.
She lives in the head of reanimated barfly Ida (Buckley again), and even possesses her frequently to ramble in King’s English. This also begins well before Ida’s fatal fall, which brings her to Annette Bening’s lab for emergency resurrection. Once that happens, the schizoid ticks get worse, and the Bonnie-and-Clyde courtship enters its honeymoon.
I give credit to Jessie Buckley for doing Herculean work here, all things considered, although her performance is a stylistic collision that will leave some with whiplash. As Ida and the Mary Shelley entity within her, she churns out a synthesis of colorful character work and pop-star bombast that is memorable and at times hypnotic.
Picture, if you will, the pretentious avant-garde artifice of Lady Gaga in her Artpop era – you know, the deliberate ‘look at me’ energy in smeared paint and bright costumes – fused with the manic, black-and-white throwback melodrama of AEW pro wrestler “Timeless” Toni Storm, complete with the latter’s voice.
There is a polished, performance-art quality to Buckley’s movements, even if it’s Brechtian. A tilt of her head could come from a curated vintage photograph that reflects a strike against the mundane. And when Shelley speaks, through Ida and as an omniscient spectre, the delivery is pure “Timelessness” – grandiloquent, breathless, and bordering on a cinematic breakdown.
She doesn’t act, she conducts – chin up, chest out – with an old-Hollywood audacity that demands a spotlight while the world crumbles.
When the film is in a comfort zone, it fires on all cylinders. Sandy Powell’s costume design, especially Buckley’s burnt orange dress and crimped bleached-blond hair, echoes a Sin City–adjacent aesthetic that shouldn’t work in full color, but somehow does. However, there are noticeable cracks in the booze-soaked foundation.
Once the narrative shifts into ‘rebirth mode’ with the undead lovebirds on the run, it loses some steam. Gyllenhaal seems more interested in the sociopolitical fallout of Ida’s renewed existence and milieu than the crackling energy that got her there. Moving the action toward a more conventional pursuit involving Peter Sarsgaard’s Detective Wiles took the focus off the more interesting voltage of the weird science.
A love story with high stakes, exploring the galvanizing mystery of creation, turns into a languid road movie. Then dance numbers start out of nowhere, inexplicably, to serve no purpose other than to distract from a plot with a slowing heart rate. The second half feels like a stylish drift where voltage sparks here and there when it could be crackling like a Tesla coil.
Ultimately, The Bride! suffers from its own self-awareness. It postures like a wannabe cult classic that shoots for becoming the next big aesthetic obsession, but Gyllenhaal and Warner clearly try too hard to engineer that status. The ‘mass erotic freakouts’ and ‘punk-rock prayer’ aesthetics feel less like organic creative choices and more like a checklist that prioritizes vibes over narrative cohesion.
It has the brain of an expensive indie experiment stuck, in many ways, in a blockbuster’s body. The result is exhausting for average moviegoers. Gyllenhaal took a swing, but she assembled a collection of disjointed parts, instead of a whole being.
The Bride!
PROS
- Jessie Buckley is a dynamo
- The film is colorfully put together
CONS
- Christian Bale is 'kind of there' with mostly nothing to do while Buckley is raging
- They treat cops like crap except, of course, for Sarsgaard because... well, obviously because he sleeps with the director
- Maggie Gyllenhaal cast this based on her friends list
