Movie Review: Maggie Gyllenhaal's 'The Bride!' is a Frankenstein riff with a pulse

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Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” is a big, brash swing at a new “The Bride of Frankenstein” that struggles to cohere its many parts. But I’ll say this for it: It’s alive.

Just months after Guillermo del Toro presented his lavish “Frankenstein,” Gyllenhaal, in her follow-up to her excellent 2021 directorial debut, “The Lost Daughter,” has set her sights on reimagining 1935’s “The Bride of Frankenstein.” The sequel starred Boris Karloff and, in the dual role of the Bride and Mary Shelley, Elsa Lanchester.

But in “The Bride of Frankenstein,” the shock-haired Bride is only on screen for a handful of minutes at the end of the film. Gyllenhaal, who also wrote her film, has corrected the imbalance, refashioning the story from the Bride’s perspective and concocting a protagonist of unfiltered feminist fury. As played by Jessie Buckley, she is both a victim of male control and a reanimated avenging angel.

Buckley is also, like Lanchester was, Shelley. In the movie’s opening moments, Shelley speaks from the beyond directly to us. She has a story, she says, that’s been stuck inside her, like a dream or a tumor. “What I wanted to say, I couldn’t,” she says. “I couldn’t even think it.”

So Gyllenhaal has placed her story not in the early 19th century, when “Frankenstein” was written, or in the present day, but in the 1930s, around when “The Bride of Frankenstein” came out. When Frankenstein’s monster, here simply “Frank” (Christian Bale), stumbles along, he’s been lonely for not just a few years but a century.

But first we meet Ida, a Chicago party girl who, out one night with a table full of gangsters, experiences a sudden eruption of raw honesty — the words spurt out of her uncontrollably — that quickly gets her killed.

When Frank turns up at the office of Dr. Euphronios (Annette Bening), his request of a companion is at first poorly received. “Give me a break, Frank,” she retorts. “Everyone’s lonely.” But Dr. Euphronios, too tempted to push scientific (and ethical) boundaries, decides to do it, and quickly enough they’ve dug up a corpse (Ida’s) and electrified her back to life. Easy peasy.

But as soon as she comes to, it’s clear Ida — with platinum blond hair and an ink-blot stain on her cheek from the IV drip — isn’t so keen on the plan. Informed that she’s to be his bride, she spits up blood and laughs. Get married? “Frankly, no,” she says.

In her new life, Ida is reinvigorated as much by Shelley’s spirit as Dr. Euphronios’ lab. She speaks full of puns and quips and literary references. Coming off her award-winning performance in “Hamnet,” Buckley clearly relishes the role, turning Ida into an unruly and raw vessel of female emancipation.

But while “The Bride!” very definitely has gender politics on its mind, Gyllenhaal is as set on having fun as much as she is prodding dated notions. This is a movie with an exclamation point in its title, after all. And Gyllenhaal delights in sending Ida and Frank on a fantastical adventure that pays as much homage to “Bonnie and Clyde” as it does “Frankenstein.”

As much as they get off on the wrong foot, Ida and Frank are drawn together out of outcast necessity. And, after a night at a dance club that turns darkly sinister, Ida realizes that sexual assault is more of a threat from other men than it is from her presumptive groom. Frank, played with endearing earnestness by Bale, is more of a big softie than a monster. His favorite things in the world are musicals.

Frank and Ida frequently stop in at movie theaters on their journey, which takes them to New York. (A lightbulb-festooned Times Square is vividly rendered in Karen Murphy’s lush production design.) The movie star Frank is most fond of, Ronnie Reed, is played by Maggie’s brother Jake Gyllenhaal, whose frequent on-screen appearances add another dose of levity to “The Bride!”

So do the detectives on the pair’s trail (Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz), whose dynamic is another, more real-world commentary on gender roles. The whole group comes together around the time Frank leads a song-and-dance routine to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” a nod to Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” (1974).

Led by a careening, foot-stomping Bale, the scene could well be about when the feeling takes hold of “The Bride!” being just a little too much. The tonal extremes and multilayered theatricality of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s movie-mad movie are, by any measure, a lot. But I would argue such ambitious gambits are exactly the kind that a filmmaker in their sophomore outing ought to be taking. “The Bride!” feels constantly like an act of plate-spinning that's about to collapse. That it doesn’t is a fever-dream feat, one that makes me eager to see what Gyllenhaal does next.

“The Bride!,” a Warner Bros. release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong/bloody violent content, sexual content/nudity and language. Running time: 127 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.