“Frankenstein? Can’t the kids think of anything new these days?”
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! begins with a direct address from Mary Shelley herself, through the medium of a black-and-white monologue that harkens all the way back to her Monster’s classic 1931 film appearance. Shelley is played by Jessie Buckley here, who stars as the titular Bride, in a dual role that draws clear parallels between the restrictively patriarchal society of both characters’ worlds – Shelley’s real world as the writer and the fictional landscape that her poor, unfortunate souls inhabit.
Christian Bale joins as Frank himself (Frankenstein was his father’s name), who enlists the help of the cunning Doctor Euphronius to create a mate for himself from the body of a (preferably beautiful) woman.
This isn’t the first adaptation of Frankenstein to include Shelley herself as a character – Rona Munro’s Scottish stage adaptation still lingers in fairly recent memory, among others – in fact, it feels like the rather trendy thing to do when you’re trying to modernise the story for a post-#MeToo audience (which gets an extremely vocal shout-out in this film). I’ve never been too sure of the idea myself: it feels like a slam-dunk on paper, but can sometimes pull us out of the “here and now” of the story. Gyllenhaall approaches this idea from a slightly more interesting angle here, though, with Shelley’s words and ideas breaking through into the central Bride, as if the pair are two minds sharing one body.
In an early bit of narration, Shelley describes this as a “possession” and it certainly feels that way, with The Bride’s accent shifting from a cool, American drawl to a very prim and proper English lilt. While this (like a lot of The Bride!’s ideas) doesn’t entirely work – Buckley plays her as a cannon so loose that it’s sometimes hard to actually follow who she is at any given moment and what she intends to do next – the ambition and dedication is commendable in its own right. I didn’t see Buckley at all; she just managed to become this agent of chaos (one character outright calls her a ‘firecracker’).
Set in 1936, placing it right alongside the original Bride of Frankenstein’s release a year previously, the film has a misty, noir sensibility to its world, but it’s playful and creative enough to inject its cities – Chicago and New York – with incongruous elements that make them feel larger than life. Our pair of lovers attend a techno rave complete with a bold injection of Cabaret-style queerness, and there seems to be a black-and-white cinema on every corner, showing a toe-tapping Jake Gyllenhaall who has an extended part as America’s favourite fictional movie star, Ronnie Reed, who Frank adores with endearing goofiness that reminds us of how human he can be, in spite of his darker origins.
Both of the central characters feel torn between their inherent humanity and the brutality of their fight for survival in a world that rejects them. Here, Gyllenhaall sees that as an incredibly male-centric world, (a theme which runs the full course of the film’s two hours), and there are interesting ideas at play regarding The Bride. In particular it is her ability to inspire the silenced women of the world to take action for themselves which features, but this uprising feels underdeveloped and ultimately left behind as we move into the final act. Ideally it could have been brought into the fold to complement everything else going on nicely. There’s also an entire sub-plot regarding the dubious nature of a Mafia boss and his gangsters, who appear to have roots everywhere that does pay off in the end, but feels unnecessary rather than engaging. It is as if Gyllenhaall had felt the need to include it as a nod to the conventions of the noir genre and the time period as a whole.
Like its own monsters, The Bride! has a bit of a patchwork feeling to it at times, hitting the right note for the most part but with a few pitfalls here and there that might make it a little hard to love. The central relationship is strong, but it’s very much The Bride’s tale here. As a result, I didn’t fully get a handle on Frank as a character. It’s nice to see him shaking hands with a star of the silver screen – that’s a clever way of nodding to the cinematic legacy of the character and his story – but I wanted to know slightly more about what made him tick, beyond the moments of intensity and brutality that Bale’s conflicted Romeo brings to the table, to really feel the stakes of the danger for both parties.
Penelope Cruz and Peter Sarsgaard play detectives hot on their trail, but feel a bit disconnected from the story until we near the end, and occasionally that story at play feels a little too eager to telegraph its themes and its main beats.
At one point, near the very end, I actively thought “Oh come on, we were all thinking that already. Did you really have to have someone say it outright?”
That feeling was swiftly overshadowed by the film’s final shot, though, which, alongside the fantastic choice for a credits song, reminded me of Gyllenhaall’s clever (if slightly indulgent) hand behind the camera, and put a smile on my face as I left the cinema.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong bloody violence, gore, sexual violence, sex, very strong language.
The Bride! is in cinemas now.
