Monster movies come in strange bunches. Vampires dominated the screen in the 2010s, as gritty zombie hordes had the decade before that. Lately, we’re awash in Frankensteins, each adding stylized flavor to Mary Shelley’s novel: Zelda Williams’s goofy high-school version, Lisa Frankenstein; Yorgos Lanthimos’s steampunk reimagining, Poor Things; and Guillermo Del Toro’s faithful-to-a-fault take, currently up for nine Oscars. All used Shelley’s tale to sow sympathy for the creature, a relatable innocent navigating a world they didn’t ask to live in.
Now shambling down the block comes Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a proudly discordant spin on Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel to the classic 1931 Frankenstein movie that probed the titular monster’s desire for a companion. Rebuilding that story around its female lead could have made for a provocatively modern interpretation. Instead, any attempt by Gyllenhaal at conveying a message is drowned out by her film’s overwhelming goofiness.
The Bride! has a little bit of something for everyone: Do you like Fred Astaire musicals? Or throwback gangster pictures? Perhaps you’re in the mood for a girl-power revolution, or maybe you just want to watch a scar-ridden colossus curb-stomp a goon—Gyllenhaal seems to want viewers to have it all, as long as they can tolerate frequent meta-textual references and buckets of gore. The ambition on display reflects other recent Warner Bros. passion projects, such as Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Wuthering Heights, that let exciting directors work on a grand scale, Hollywood timidity be damned. Each of these managed (Wuthering Heights possibly the least) to thread social commentary with entertainment rather seamlessly. But The Bride!, exclamation point included, shows how a filmmaker can end up getting lost in their venture’s size, remembering to throw the big ideas at the audience only right at the end.
The movie is Gyllenhaal’s follow-up to The Lost Daughter, an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel that announced her as a directorial talent. That earlier film, a languid, unsettling thriller, focused on its protagonist’s emotional breakdown during a supposedly tranquil Mediterranean vacation. I was intrigued by the idea of Gyllenhaal taking on Bride of Frankenstein, a movie that’s been remade only slightly less often than other famous horror stories, including Frankenstein. Given Gyllenhaal’s last work, I hoped for something similarly subtle, a meaningful twist on a well-trodden formula.
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Instead, her creation is an amalgam of disparate concepts, brought together in defiance of storytelling logic (and the opinions of test-screen audiences). Jessie Buckley stars as Ida, a gangster’s girl in 1930s Chicago. At the beginning of the film, Ida eats an oyster so slimy that she reacts violently to it and becomes possessed by Mary Shelley herself. Soon enough, she’s been murdered by the lowlifes she hangs out with—but fear not, because across town, Frankenstein’s monster (played by Christian Bale) is trying to find a suitable mate. He and a mad scientist (Annette Bening) dig up Ida’s corpse and zap it back to life.
The plot doesn’t get any simpler from there. But every time a viewer might begin to investigate a hole in the story’s logic, there’s another distracting plot development or act of violence to grasp. How does Shelley exist in the same world as her fictional beast, one might ask? The Bride’s answer: Don’t worry about it! Once Ida is revived, Buckley is rife with tics and guttural asides, switching between rat-a-tat mobster slang and Shelley’s flowery English prose like some postmodern literary Gollum. Bale, lumbering around in impressive makeup, is mournful and sweet as “Frank,” but prone to fits of rage when threatened. Together, the grimy pair start riding the rails across the country, watching movies starring Frank’s favorite actor, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), and somehow sparking a feminist plot to overthrow the kinds of mean gangsters who killed Ida in the first place.
This all sounds like a lot—and that’s because it is. These events are tied together only by the fact that they happen to Frank and Ida. Gyllenhaal simply cannot pick a tone, and although maximalist mash-ups in this vein have worked in the hands of more confident directors such as Baz Luhrmann, too often the choices here feel random for the sake of randomness. The aforementioned uprising, for example, occurs during a dance sequence that inspires an army of young women to imitate Ida, down to her peculiar face tattoos. I haven’t even mentioned the subplot of Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his plucky Girl Friday Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), the bickering duo chasing Frankenstein and his bride. Yes, this is a script that figured a big-budget gangster-monster epic could also manage to fit a screwball buddy comedy.
I do want to applaud Gyllenhaal for going so big. At its best, this kind of genre splicing could be a fun, flirty knee to the face of “elevated horror,” trying to have fun with the genre rather than anointing it with arty prestige. But The Bride! repeatedly lurches toward a serious, almost hectoring mode, in case the audience doesn’t realize that Ida’s tortured love story is also one of liberation from the patriarchy. The film sometimes dazzles in its ridiculousness, but there are simply too many appendages sewn on for it to make any coherent sense.
