This monster mash is no cinematic smash
The fact that Oscar voting closed on March 5th should work out well for actress Jessie Buckley, who is considered a Best Actress lock for her stellar turn in Hamnet. Her newest film, The Bride!, opened the next day. Had voters watched it before casting their votes her way, they may have thought twice. Buckley is a terrific actress, but watching The Bride! you get the sense she needed to decompress from Hamnet’s emotionally taxing, heavy material. The Buckley we see in The Bride! is looser, ferocious, and over the top in a manner more annoying than fun.
Buckley’s misstep is all the more notable given that The Bride! is written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who directed Buckley to another Oscar nomination in 2021’s excellent The Lost Daughter. That film explored themes of motherhood and feminism in subtle and affecting ways. Not so The Bride!, which is an in-your-face, audacious reimagining of the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, which itself was based on a briefly mentioned character in Mary Shelley’s original 1918 novel Frankenstein.
That The Bride! comes on the heels of Guillermo del Toro’s major award contender Frankenstein from last year also does Gyllenhaal’s film no favors. Her version features Christian Bale as Frankenstein’s monster, a lonely sad sack called Frank who aches for a companion. With Jacob Elordi’s sensitive and moving performance as the creature in del Toro’s film so fresh in our minds, Bale’s incarnation feels like a cheap imitation.
The exclamation point in Gyllenhaal’s title aptly characterizes her film’s sensibility. She brings a punk rock vibe to the proceedings, placing Shelley’s minor character the Bride (Buckley) front and center. In the novel, the Bride is an unnamed creature started but never completed by Dr. Frankenstein, who worries about the ramifications of two creatures spawning more. Here, though, a “mad scientist” (yes, that term is used, underscoring the film’s comic book feel) named Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) brings back to life a recently deceased party girl (or was she!?) at the imploring of the depressed Frank. Frank and his new Bride, named Ida, try to find a place for themselves in a society that scorns them, resulting in their anger and fear causing several intentional and unintentional deaths.
Buckley chews the scenery left and right as the reanimated Ida, and Gyllenhaal’s often incoherent script doesn’t help viewers engage with the character or the film as a whole. Buckley actually has a dual role: in an awkward meta framing device, she also plays Mary Shelley, directing and commenting on Ida and the narrative in a theatrical, cackling, detracting manner that is as uninteresting as it is unnecessary.
Gyllenhaal clearly wants to bring a feminist perspective to the oft-told story, but most of her thematic ideas feel borrowed from better movies (Bonnie and Clyde and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo immediately come to mind). A female detective character played by Penélope Cruz, who is repeatedly overlooked and underestimated by men, seems inserted merely to emphasize Gyllenhaal’s already overt point about female agency and the lack thereof, especially in the 1930s period in which Gyllenhaal resets the story.
On the plus side, Gyllenhaal’s real-life husband Peter Sarsgaard makes for an appropriately weary but dedicated, compassionate, and apologetic depression-era detective, and her brother Jake has a nice turn as a matinee idol whose on-screen persona Frank becomes obsessed with. The great character actors John Magaro (Showing Up; September 5; Past Lives) and Jeannie Berlin (You Hurt My Feelings), always a welcome presence, however, are wasted in small parts as a mob henchman and Dr. Euphronious’s live-in help, respectively. Gyllenhaal assembled an exceptional collection of actors; that they are saddled with such an uninspired script and such misguided, excessive direction is the film’s real tragedy.
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The Bride! is currently playing, including at the AMC Metreon, the AMC Kabuki, the Apple Van Ness, and the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco, the Grand Lake, the Regal Jack London, and the New Parkway in Oakland, the Rialto Cinemas Cerrito in El Cerrito, and the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville.
