Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is a “there are two wolves inside you” situation. One wolf likes classic literature. One wolf craves punkish anarchy. These sides are in strict opposition, a nervous tension that never gets shaken out over the course of the careening couple hour runtime, which introduces a metric ton of ideas, and does very little with most of them. Maximalist design is not an inherent flaw. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a monster love story that vacillates between noir and musical tropes. There is no restraint and that’s the point. There is, however, also very little control and design and the frame of the movie buckles under the weight all of its big, partly explored ideas.
Jessie Buckley stars as Ida, The Bride, and the ghost of Mary Shelley. Christian Bale is Frank, who has emerged from monster lore, and found himself in 1930s Chicago, searching for some romantic company. With the help of Annette Bening’s Dr. Euphronius, Ida is brought back to life, and Frank might be in for more than he ever bargained for. See, Ida is a renegade, a modernized Bride, who is wed only to her own passions, a woman of her own principles, who wants to set the world to rights, and get revenge for Mary Shelley, who the movie supposes would take punkish delight in its whimsical world of monster lore turned on its head.
It’s a whole mess of fun ideas flagrantly thrown into a blender. It’s thrilling, in one way, that the movie is built with such abandon. There’s space for filmmakers like Maggie Gyllenhaal to impart their own dreams onto the world of monster movies. Perhaps it’s even preferable to the dryly controlled alternative, like Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein from last year, but despite the overriding influence, can never live up to the gonzo worldbuilding of Yorgos Lanthimos’ wonderful Poor Things (2023). You can imagine everyone involved in its creation seeing that movie come out and throwing whatever they had in a conceptual blender, aimlessly searching to find new value.
Not much is found despite many small moments of frustrating fun. That’s what The Bride! comes down to, a collection of moments. Some of these moments are deeply annoying (treating classic literature like modern reference culture is soul-draining stuff), and some moments are truly fun (what if Damien Chazelle’s cinematic-reference-loving Babylon (2022) were also a monster movie?), but the center does not hold together at all.
The Bride! is a hot mess. It’s definitely hot. And it’s definitely a mess. Call it a monster mash of preposterously ill-fitting ideas that are jammed together without much sense for why. If the why of it all hardly matters, then there is some level of delight in the recklessness of it all. Because there are so many recent stabs at Frankenstein, it’s valid for someone to dive off the deep end and see if it all falls apart. That it does all fall apart is hardly as important as the fact The Bride! is taking such big swings. We could only be so lucky if more movies that fail do so out of outsized ambition, and inability to contain everything the filmmakers wish to achieve. There is a great privilege in failing on your own terms. You’d just prefer not to.