By Matthew Moorcroft

Unsure

• Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
• Starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz
• R

Bursting onto the frame with a loud, overwhelming jolt to the senses not unsimiliar to the very lightning bolt that brought Frankenstein’s monster to life years and years ago, The Bride! is almost as unwieldy and impossible to quantify as said monster as well. It’s the stitched together, falling apart at the seams kind of picture that has so much bolted onto it that it threatens to completely undo itself at the slightest hint of pushback. It is, in essence, a creature of it’s own making; a demented version of itself at war with it’s own themes at times but also deeply, and purposefully, alienating towards it’s audience.

This is both The Bride!‘s strongest attribute and it’s ultimate weakness, as that willingness to push things to the wind and move to the beat of it’s own drum means there will likely not anything like The Bride! for a while. For some, this will be a blessing, as the very clear sensibilities of the film won’t appeal to everybody – least of all fans of the original text – but for those willing to move on that beat, The Bride! has merit as a unique, if somewhat clunky, piece of feminist rage art that at least is coming from the mind of a filmmaker with a distinct voice and vision.

Planting the Frankenstein story, or at least a belated sequel to it, in era of the 1930s – also the same era of the original release of Bride of Frankenstein, which this is riffing off of – and also adding in a massive dose of meta storytelling in having Mary Shelley herself, ghost and all, become the driver of the story, The Bride! reimagines the story of the titular Bride as one of a crime noir in the vein of classic Hollywood. An escort for a mob boss is murdered after she fails to comply to him, and while the investigation continues into her death – and later other ones – she is resurrected by a deeply lonely Frankenstein’s monster, here renamed “Frank” for some level of companionship and love. Her memory is gone, but her personality remains, and now it’s fueled by the vengeful spirit of the women done wrong in their lives over the years by powerful men.

It’s a hell of a premise, and The Bride! takes advantage of it’s period setting and noir aesthetics to play things as pure melodrama or as heightened visual poetry more often then not. Gyllenhaal makes formal choices here that are unlike anything else in modern studio filmmaking, from the constant switching of black and white to color to editing that blurs the line between pure fiction and some of reality. Hard to go wrong with a detective in the rain chasing the one who got away, all the way said one runs off with her Clyde to continue their spree of crime, or a climax where a literal mob chases after the monster once again.

It’s a shame that, outside of that initial conceit and framework, The Bride! really has nowhere to go as a film and while Jessie Buckley is putting in her all as she kicks, screams, writhes, and does multiple accents, her character is never fully formed and is more a literal vessel for the script’s thematic meat. And while that thematic meat is certainly interesting – particularly an angle where the film posits an interesting question about how men find powerful women equally scary and attractive, a psychosexual element that’s unexplored – it’s bogged down by too much in the way of running around in circles and having more interesting angles of it’s story left untold.

In fact, for all of it’s clear auteur weirdness and interesting filmmaking, The Bride! sadly also feels stripped down and lacking at points. The violence isn’t as gnarly or grisly as it should be, it’s sexual content feels toned down to the point of being mostly being perfunctory despite being a story inherently about a man desiring to create a literal sex doll, and the film’s change of genres in the second half from gothic romance noir to monster movie don’t necessarily gel too well. It’s a truly stitchpunk effort, stapled together in the edit with a nailgun and calling it a day.

And yet, I found The Bride! to still be deeply fascinating. It’s got moments of brilliance buried in it’s mangled corpse of a final product, and while I have no idea if Gyllenhaal original version of the flick was any better it’s clear she has directorial eye worth keeping around. While I suspect a cult following will eventually follow it around, to an extent I suspect The Bride! as a picture will be more interesting to discuss and dissect rather then actually watch, which is the real tragedy here.