A forceful, furious blast of feminist energy and wild theatricality, writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s genre mash-up The Bride! is like riding shotgun for a righteous crime spree in a car going a hundred over any speed limits. It’s brash, confrontational, empowered, and most importantly, entertainingly high in energy. A perfect reflection of its titular character, The Bride! has no filter and a lot to get off its decomposing chest. While a lot of it is rather obvious in intent and unsubtle, the sheer gusto and audacity of Gyllenhaal’s vision deserves high praise. The Bride! takes no half measures, and while the results are sometimes messy and spilling out over the margins, it’s breathtaking to behold.
The film opens on Ida (Jessie Buckley), a gun moll hanging out with a bunch of mid-level mobster cronies in mid-1910’s Chicago. During a boisterous evening out on the town, Ida becomes possessed by the spirit of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley (also played by Buckley), who takes over the mind and body of this young woman to help set into motion a sequel to her greatest literary success. (Yeah, you have to be able to balance the fact that “Frankenstein” is both real and fictional in this world, which is admittedly a tough bridge to cross, but is handled with a sort of loopy, chaotic glee.) Ida dies by being chucked down a flight of stairs and gets buried in a potter’s field.
Into the city waltzes Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), who has reluctantly decided to take up his father’s name for the past century of his aimless wandering. He looks up Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a mad scientist who has studied Frankenstein’s work well. Frank is a bit worse for wear, but his main problem is that he’s, frankly, horny. Frank wants a mate, so he teams with the doctor to dig up Ida’s body and reanimate her. The experiment is a success, but the undead woman can’t remember much about her past and is still plagued by Shelley’s inner monologue. It takes some time for “Penelope,” as Frank dubs her, to warm up to her new husband, but once they create a media sensation of sorts, their bond strengthens and Ida’s past comes back to haunt her.
There’s a lot going on in The Bride!. Anyone expecting something akin to a classic monster movie is in for a major shock, as Gyllenhaal cycles through a variety of different genres to make a great number of points about the underestimation of women and male gaslighting. At some points, The Bride! is a Bonnie and Clyde riff, or perhaps more appropriately, a re-take on what the Joker sequel attempted, but failed miserably at. It’s visual touchstones are classic sci-fi, Grand Guignol, gangster movies, and lavish musicals, as evidenced by a lovelorn Frank’s love for cinema, particularly the song and dance romances of actor Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), a Gene Kelly/Fred Astaire coded matinee idol. Oh, and it’s also a detective picture that comments on women’s roles in the work place as Penélope Cruz plays an underestimated female detective (at a time when such things were looked down upon and dismissed) and Peter Sarsgaard as her nonplussed and droll male partner.
Every competing thread in The Bride! keeps colliding into each other, but instead of feeling disoriented and half-baked, the result is overwhelmingly operatic in its approach to ghoulish melodrama. A lot of Gyllenhaal’s choices as a director are pure fever dream fodder (like the appearance of something akin to a 1980s German goth nightclub in the middle of 1910s Chicago), but that’s what keeps everything so interesting. While Gyllenhaal’s script follows a predictable path to a probably unavoidable conclusion, the ultimate road to get there is ablaze with big swings and righteous fervour. It’s a film where the woman behind it is holding court in a fashion that dares the viewer to look away. Gyllenhaal wants viewers to make a choice between embracing the madness or trying to argue against it. It’s bold filmmaking, and I suspect that even those who don’t like The Bride! will have to give it at least a begrudging amount of respect for its forcefulness.
Bale and Sarsgaard are good sports as the supplemental males that help to move the story along, but The Bride! belongs to the trio of strong women at its core. Buckley’s full throttle and throated triple performance (as Ida, Shelley, and The Bride, who all have different personalities and outlooks) is over-the-top madness done right. Cruz hasn’t had a role this captivating in a long time, and her character (alongside Sarsgaard, with whom she has great comedic and dramatic chemistry) functions as the audience surrogate that can’t believe what they’re witnessing. And Bening is clearly having a blast playing an ethically and morally dubious woman of science, a part usually reserved for unhinged male performers, not understated and slyly witty women.
The Bride! certainly won’t be to all tastes, but it needs to be seen before being dismissed. There are certainly some visual and thematic elements that feel derivative of other films that have come before, but few have the reserve and nerve as Gyllenhaal’s work. This is one of those films that I fear might be ahead of its time. Given a few years, I expect the critical and audience consensus to turn around on this one. I don’t know what viewers expect from The Bride!, but I’m not sure if the population at large will ever be ready for it.
The Bride! is now playing in theatres everywhere.
