The Bride! movie review: Violent spin on Frankenstein mate will give you whiplash

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s riotous take on the bride of Frankenstein plays a familiar song over its closing credits, the Monster Mash.

That’s what The Bride is, a mash-up of competing styles and confused ideas. As much as soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Jessie Buckley is transcendent as the unhinged Bride with a gonzo performance that still, mostly, manages to magnetise, the film itself is shambolic.

The prevailing questions that run through your head as you’re watching are, what is this, and what was it meant to be?

In simple terms, The Bride is about a young woman named Ida (Buckley) in the 1930s who is connected to the Chicago mob. She dies a violent death when she falls/is pushed down some long stairs.

Around the same time, Frankenstein’s monster, here everyone calls him Frank (Christian Bale), comes to Chicago in search of Dr Euphronious (Anette Bening), a scientist who has the know-how to recreate Dr Frankenstein’s experiments in re-animating the dead.

Frank has been walking our world for over a century, and he’s mighty lonely. He longs for a companion, someone who won’t turn from him in horror every time they see his face. They dig up Ida’s body and after some prodding and charges of electricity, she’s aliiiiiiive.

Frank is depicted as someone who wants to lean into his better, sweeter nature – one of the ongoing things is that he’s obsessed with movies headlined by the fictional actor Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), and often pictures himself as the marquee star of Reed’s stories.

But the violence emerges when he or Ida is threatened, and she too has a penchant for elaborate destruction when pushed. They are the undead Bonnie and Clyde.

Ida, who is permanently stained by black liquid across her face, giving her a Joker-esque visage, is chaos, and Buckley plays her with delicious glee.

At some point during the film, she becomes a feminist icon to all the downtrodden women of 1930s America, after an admittedly impressive dance sequence at a fancy pants party where she accuses a powerful mobster of silencing and killing women.

One of the film’s least successful elements is a clumsy framing device in which Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, speaks directly to the audience, and is implied to be in Ida’s head.

Shelley is also played by Buckley, so the two characters are intrinsically linked, and it’s supposed to be some kind of connection about women, feminism, revolution, freedom and all that good stuff. Except, it’s bewildering and incoherent as to what it’s actually trying to say.

The system is corrupt? Duh. Women are repressed? Well, yeah, obviously.

It’s a “ghost story”, Shelley tells us, except that it’s not. There’s no sense that there’s any real imprint across the ages other than Ida’s occasional British-accented mutterings.

The Bride is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second time in the director’s chair and it’s a massive step-up in terms of budget and spectacle, a reported $US92 million in production costs compared to her first, a small indie drama called The Lost Daughter with Olivia Colman.

What the two films have in common is that they’re both stressful experiences. But whereas The Lost Daughter’s anxiety is built into its lead character and her mental state, in The Bride, it comes more from the discombobulating experience of being yanked from one tone to another.

The movie was originally set up at Netflix but the forecast budget blow-out saw the streamer soon drop the project, only for Warner Bros to then pick it up. After alarming early test screenings, The Bride was put into “turnaround”, which meant significant reshoots and re-edits.

Gyllenhaal has said she was asked to excise some of the violence and she obliged, although there’s still a decent bit of gore, body horror and violence that remains.

Maybe it’s because of those compromises on Gyllenhaal’s original vision, but The Bride does feel like there’s the movie it is, and the silhouette of the movie it wanted to be, as if Buckley’s maximalist performance is out of step with what’s going on around the character.

She’s raging, but the film is not.

So what you get is a movie, like Frankenstein’s creature, that’s made up of different parts, but the sum of it is a monster, and not in a good way.

Rating: 2/5

The Bride is in cinemas