Here Comes ‘The Bride’

The Bride! is a mess! As insistent and in-your-face as its emphatic title, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s monster mash of a movie confuses a brat sensibility with radical politics. This loving riff on Mary Shelley’s forlorn antihero and his quest for a soul mate, overwrought with zany affection, becomes the vehicle for increasingly kooky hijinks that double as grandstanding about the obvious repugnancy of male chauvinism. It’s a gas, until it’s a bore.

The Bride! ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Written by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz
Running time: 126 mins

The amped-up protagonist is a 1930s Chicago floozy turned underworld corpse named Ida who Jessie Buckley brings to life with about as much subtlety as electroshock therapy. She’s a gangster moll who goes from mousy to mouthy after the ghost of Mary Shelley (also Buckley) decides to possess her body. Shelley manifests by making Ida uncontrollably deliver a string of Brit-accented retorts and involuntary linguistic tics, the kind of sassy posturing that quickly gets her pushed down a flight of stairs. But don’t worry: this sloppy smorgasbord of a script makes sure Ida is alive and kicking for a plump two hours of goofball genre tropes and flinty feminist harangues.

In this meta monsterverse, Shelley’s actual spirit co-exists in the same world as Frankenstein’s fictional creature (Christian Bale), her 1818 literary creation, who has been roaming the earth alone for over a century. Now, Mr. “Frank” Frankenstein (“My father’s name,” he explains) has come all the way to Chicago to find the eminent Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening). She, however, is immediately curious to put Frank under medical observation himself. It was her published experiments into cadaverous “re-invigoration” that caught his attention. “I’m looking for an intercourse,” he tells Euphronious: a conjugal relationship. “Is this about sex, Frank?” asks the good doctor. “This is about loneliness,” he replies with puppy-dog eyes.

Frank is a closet romantic who, hiding under a black fedora and face-covering scarf, steals away to movie theaters to see the latest musical starring Hollywood heartthrob Ronnie Reed (Maggie’s little brother Jake Gyllenhaal). His crooner-inflected “love comes easy when you dance” sensibility is a clear homage to Fred Astaire, and Frank even imagines himself among the Busby Berkeley back-up hoofers, right down to the black-tie-and-tails. Putting on the Ritz, indeed! Mel Brooks would be proud.

So the mad scientist and the stitched-together sad sack run off to Potter’s Field together to dig up a recently discarded indigent that, coincidentally, also happens to be Ida. And, after a quick “To Life!” toast and a flick of the volt-o-meter switch in Euphronious’ lab, they revive a belching, ink-spewing, amnesiac version of Ida — now unnamed, unmoored, and increasingly unhinged.

Frank finds her daunting, and even feels embarrassed to presume that she would be his bride. And when Euphronious gently suggests some boundaries to help her lay low, she bristles. “I would prefer not to,” she says with a smug sneer, referencing Melville’s obstinate scrivener with a haughty resistance that’s less punk and more pout. What a Girlboss, amirite?

She wants to go dancing so, after sneaking out of Euphronious’ house, Frank takes her to a seedy nightclub. He’s content to watch her shimmy and shake, happily sitting on the sidelines and sucking down coconut-shelled cocktails. But when two drunk bullies harass them afterwards and try to rape her, Frank quickly cracks open their skulls. Oops. “People love a monster — I’ve been through this before,” a rattled Frank says, trying to save his new bride by ditching her before they both get hunted down. But she doesn’t want to leave him, and insistently goes on the lam right alongside, using the shiny new moniker Penny Rogers.

Like 2024’s messy indulgence Joker: Folie a Deux, Gyllenhaal’s pop-culture commentary on society’s villains is overstuffed and underthought, a sumptuously produced empty spectacle of references and wink-wink asides that invoke violent femmes and riot grrrls without the persuasive force of a well-developed story sufficiently rooted in those antiestablishment ideas. Buckley’s trademark banshee wails only go so far as character development. What’s really missing is a love story — or a horror story — that’s really electrifying.