Among all the directorial debuts made by actors in this century, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Elena Ferrante adaptation “The Lost Daughter” (2021) has a special place. Nominated for Oscars in Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay, writer-director Gyllenhaal’s film confidently navigated that loaded term called the female experience with its unpretty and unglamorous shades, unafraid to engage with taboo topics around motherhood, marriage, and the landmine of female relationships. “The Lost Daughter” felt so complete, so uncompromising, and so stylishly envisioned that it presented any sophomore feature Gyllenhaal could have made a near-impossible challenge. How could a follow-up live up to something so perfect?
In a way, it’s a relief to realize that Gyllenhaal doesn’t try to live up to that debut, or repeat herself with “The Bride!,” a mind-bending genre film set in a tangential “Frankenstein” universe. Instead, she swings for the fences freely, gambling liberally with a tale she experiments with in rethinking 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein.” (The rethinking goes like this: this one is about the Bride, and not so much about the male monster.) The results aren’t always satisfying, but what’s satisfying is to see Gyllenhaal operate in this limitless “I’ll try anything once” mode, an entitlement rarely afforded to women behind the camera.
“The Bride!” is more a film to feel than to explain. It is a movie lover’s movie that disarmingly worships cinema, a cacophony of ideas (some invigorating, some half-realized) that playfully mines Mary Shelley’s gothic classic, a romantic turn-on, and a rightful feminine scream all in one. And it shares something fundamental with “The Lost Daughter,” even though it lacks its cohesion: the earned anger of an uncontainable woman yearning for something more. You know, those of us (more likely, all of us, including perhaps the filmmaker herself) who the society somehow labels as “a difficult woman,” even today.
In the role of The Bride, the always terrific Jessie Buckley knows a thing or two about those fierce women, too, rebels who refuse to fit into a mold and be molded into a culturally palatable version of themselves. After all, she’s been playing them for some time now, not only in the aforementioned “The Lost Daughter” in the role of a restless mother and academic, but also in the gorgeous, grief-soaked “Hamnet” as the current Best Actress frontrunner in this year’s Academy Awards. In “The Bride!,” Buckley is Ida at first, an unapologetic firebrand agitated throughout a dinner gathering at an old-school restaurant in 1935. She seems possessed, she is subjected to violence in the hands of men, and she dies falling off a staircase, bones cracking, neck twisted.
Cut to Frank—named after his father-creator, Dr. Frankenstein—sometime later, a ramshackle creature in desperate need of a mate. Played by Christian Bale, who brings much vulnerability to the part, this Frank is closer to Boris Karloff’s iconic monster compared to Jacob Elordi’s one-of-a-kind creature interpretation in Guillermo del Toro’s masterful and elegant “Frankenstein.” With a square forehead, kindly reluctant eyes, and a soft presence, Frank begs Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) for a forever life partner. Together, they dig up Ida’s grave, and before we know it, The Bride is born from the ashes of death.
Like Ida, The Bride is a woman of many words—so much so that some of her non-stop monologues where she spits out rage, literary musings (and some kind of a black goo) feel overwrought and overwhelming. And honestly, somewhat impossible to keep up with, too. It’s a shame that Gyllenhaal didn’t dial back on the script’s wordiness to let The Bride’s rage and Frank’s newfound status as a husband of sorts speak for themselves. When the themes are overexplained ad nauseam by the characters, their power is undercut.
Still, it’s fun to witness an unhinged Buckley lose herself in those lines, giving her Grade-A pipes a real workout. Their union and journey are a wild ride from start to finish, with hints of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Natural Born Killers” throughout their accidental crime spree. The couple also unite around Frank’s love of movies, with matinee idol Ronnie Reed (Maggie’s brother Jake Gyllenhaal, working his Fred Astaire muscles) entering their orbit. Also in the mix are a pair of detectives, Peter Sarsgaard’s Jake Wiles and Penélope Cruz’s Myrna Mallow, as they try to shed some light on the crimes committed.
Studiously designed and choreographed, “The Bride!” doesn’t take a polite approach towards the violence it depicts. While that attitude creates a consistently on-edge temperament that is garish and often cheekily sexy, you still crave pockets of quietness throughout. But then again, Gyllenhaal has imagined a world where everything is heightened and maximalist—from The Bride’s signature burnt orange dress of puff sleeves and cut-on-the-bias hem (straight from the genius mind of Sandy Powell), to her teased-and-crimped hair; from the visuals “Sin City”-adjacent aesthetics, to an aura that frequently winks at film noir, everything here is considered at length and thought-provoking to look at. They don’t always mesh well, but it still inspires one to applaud the wild imagination.
For a film this uninhibited and varied, Gyllenhaal’s ending feels too tidily feminist in an unsophisticated, you-go-girl kind of way that comic book adaptations have been guilty of in the past decade. While she tries to bring the monster inside all of us out of the shadows, she errs on the side of the basic that feels out of step with the world that Mary Shelley conjured up. Still, “The Bride!” is big and risky in a different way, a fantastical creative explosion you can’t look away from.
