I had one thought whenever I saw a trailer for The Bride!: this movie looks really weird. There does seem to be a rash of movies over the past few years that retell the stories of classic monsters to varying levels of effect. Frankenstein? Great! Lisa Frankenstein? Less so. Nosferatu? Modern day classic! Wolf Man? Swing and a miss… But now, Maggie Gyllenhaal wrote and directed her own version of Bride of Frankenstein, and it looks weird. True, the movie got pushed back a couple times, but that could mean a lot of things.
Well, I’ve seen it. And you know what? It is weird.
The movie opens with Mary Shelley’s (Jessie Buckley) narrating from a black-and-white realm that is, apparently, beyond the grave where she says she has a story to tell, that her novel Frankenstein has a sequel story, but being as she is dead, she hasn’t been able to tell that story…until now, where she possesses the body of a young woman named Ida (also Buckely) partying with gangsters in 1930s Chicago. Mary’s spirit takes over, she blasts back and forth between herself and Mary, where the way to tell who is speaking is to listen and see if she has a British accent and seems to know many things or not. After offending a mob boss (Zlatko Burić), Ida is removed from the club and dies in a fall. At about the same time, the Frankenstein Monster, AKA Frankenstein, AKA Frank (Christian Bale) shows up at the lab of Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Benning) to see if Euphronious can reinvigorate a dead woman and give him a companion.
The plan works, and Ida is revived, but Mary’s spirit is still inside of her, and she sometimes speaks in a British accent and spouts off synonyms for whatever words people use around her because she’s a dead writer or something. The Bride, as she is soon known, does not really remember her previous life, and any time she asks anyone, can’t seem to get a straight answer. However, Frank really wants a companion, and some murders later, and the pair are on the run, stopping mostly so Frank can indulge in movies starring his favorite song-and-dance man Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), and with the pair being wanted by the law, largely through the presence of Chicago detectives Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz). But the Bride, she has questions. Will she get answers?
Honestly, I don’t know what to make of this one. The movie is, ostensibly, a Gothic romance if Wikipedia is to be believed. That may be the best genre description that I can pin to this movie. It’s a lot of things, none of them subtle. This is a movie where mobsters recognize when someone is possessed by the dead. It’s a movie that might jump directly into a dance performance that references a very different sort of Frankenstein movie. It’s a movie where a crowd will suddenly have torches to chase the undead monsters. It’s a movie where nothing is subtle, so the major idea here about the bad ways that men treat women isn’t something you can overlook because even the better male characters in the movie have some questionable characteristics. Sure, the Bride may be falling in love with Frankie, but that doesn’t change the fact that he hiding things from her.
The bottom line for me was I didn’t know what to make of this movie. The impression seems to be that this is a story that Mary Shelley’s ghost is telling, but she’s also a spectral presence in the story. The Frankenstein story is something people know, but the movie never suggests that Shelley’s work isn’t a novel. There are frequent quotes of a Herman Melville story and novelty songs on the soundtrack. There’s the sporadic moments where Mary takes over the Bride’s body. There’s a movement that happens as a result of the Bride’s actions for some reason. In the end, it was a movie that wanted me to take it seriously, and I just don’t think it was put together in a way that would allow me to do so. There are some good performances here from many members of the cast, but that’s about all I can say in the movie’s favor.
Grade: D
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