The Bride Review
It’s rare a movie so confidently telegraphs in its first 10 seconds that it will be one of the worst movies you’ve ever seen.
In 1930s Chicago, Frankenstein (Christian Bale) - after years of loneliness - asks Dr. Euphronius (Annette Benning) to help him create a companion. They reawaken recently deceased Ida as The Bride of Frankenstein (Jessie Buckley), who quickly takes to Frankenstein, but can’t shake the repressed memories of the high-stakes drama she died amongst - nor the otherworldly ghostly presence of Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley.
The Bride is a film that will undoubtedly invite invalid criticism. From certain sections of the internet, in the echo chambers of the manosphere, you can imagine that the outrage about the distinctly feminist take on this film will clang and echo in pent up rage. And while a lot of that criticism will be invalid, the film does have some flaws when it comes to that aspect - not least of which having to watch Buckley scream “Me Too” over and over to her creator.
But to get strung up in that area is to miss the broader issues with The Bride, which revolve around its complete saturation in cringe, inability to ever tell a coherent story or build a compelling character, and the crippling decision made in the first moments of this films’ infancy that completely hamstrings it.
It’s that first decision, to tie this film back to Mary Shelley herself as a ‘trapped in limbo’ author who can only move on when she gets one more story out, that really fumbles this film. Because it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and also feels incredibly pastiche.
The author herself, inhabiting the body of a woman in duality to be the bride of a creature she wrote and dreamed up - it never comes together with a crumb of logic! Not to mention the fact that the dialogue that seems to involuntarily erupt from her (Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adoration for her vocab like it’s a super power) and Buckley’s black and white, played to the rafters performance, all mix together into an unbearable, cringeworthy watch; kind of like watching a first year uni student’s performance, you can’t quite keep your full gaze on it for fear of it.
The bad decisions don’t stop there. There’s the endless cavalcade of needless threads that spew their way onto the screen, only to be forgotten in the next instant. Our manic doctor and assistant, gone for most of the film. The smell of Frankenstein, only rarely present and only ever when needed. The appearance of a female-led revolution after The Bride’s outburst and police murder (her second, actually) that was so hamfisted there was an audible ripple of laughter at the sheer ridiculousness in our theatre.
Not to mention the montage after, where a Penelope Cruz detective (who seems stripped from an entirely different film) determines the runaway monster’s next location based on a series of copycat killings or crimes, and yet none of them have been performed by our monsters? There are whole chunks of this movie missing, that seem like they must have been crucial for it to make any sense.
And what is included instead is, frankly, unwatchable.
A hodge podge of costuming, set and art design that never amounts to anything close to a consistent or cohesive whole. Parts of this movie feel elegant and real, parts fantastical, but they never mesh together in a way that feels as if they aren’t fighting one another tooth and nail.
In interviews, Maggie Gyllenhaal has noted studio pushback on the violence and gore, but the ironic thing is that this is in far short supply in The Bride. Give us many more disgusting minutes of these two reinvigorated monsters licking black vomit off each other’s naked dessicated corpses and Frankenstein curb-stomping a rapist over what we do get - an endless parade of setups for one liners and catch phrases that are meant to make us believe in this undead feminist revolutionary, but only lead to an unbearable level of cringe.
There’s so much here that could have worked, that could have functioned as a compelling and cohesive movie. A Passengers-esque horror for Buckley’s Bride having been reawakened against her will, an exploration of what hundreds of years of solitude do for Frankenstein’s monster, and so much more have the wispy threads of a movie worth watching. But they are sidelined for one that’s not.
In the end, The Bride shows us that Maggie Gyllenhaal can take big swings. But for such a rote, done before outing, it seems those big swings are in all the wrong places.
