Summary of this article
The Bride! is Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial sophomore following The Lost Daughter (2021).
Jessie Buckley stars as the bride of Frankenstein who gets to tell her story.
The film is riven with too much indulgence and inconsistency to land anywhere bracing as a corrective expansion on the source text.
When Maggie Gyllenhaal’s debut directorial The Lost Daughter (2021) came out, it was like a secret whisper said out loud. All the agonies, not-so-pleasant emotions around motherhood that popular culture evades found bristling utterance. This gave plenty reason to wait with bated breath for her next directorial outing. Alas, as incisive as The Lost Daughter was, Gyllenhaal’s exaggerated, hyper-mounted The Bride! feels so diluted, tonally confused you’ll question if they indeed share the same director. To call a The Bride! a feminist intervention would be to massacre the source text’s far more audacious potential.
The starting foot itself is clumsy. Jessie Buckley shows up on double duty as Mary Shelley presumably speaking from purgatory and Ida, a Depression-era sex worker, who she takes possession of. In a rote, drab manner, Gyllenhaal’s Shelley rattles out her resentments against her era’s restrictions, lashing that she’ll now relay what she couldn’t write or say. Emboldened by Shelley’s spirit, Ida raises hell on a night out with friends, saying more than she’s allowed to, ultimately leading to her death by a dramatic fall down the stairs. More than a century’s leap after Shelley wrote Frankenstein, Gyllenhaal thrusts the legendary character, Frankenstein’s monster, or Frank (Christian Bale), into 1930s Chicago and New York, where he requests Dr Euphronius (Annette Bening) to stitch him a bride so he can be less lonely. The doctor is interested in him as a scientific singularity but cautions about the experiment going wrong in unimaginable directions. But the constant goading, Frank’s heartfelt appeal makes the doctor reconsider and she resurrects the corpse of Ida.
The minute the Bride zaps into life, she’s raring to dart out into the world. But her hunger for adventure is grounded and kept in check by Frank who just wants her safe, if a tad domesticated. Soon enough, the duo goes hopping berserk across cities, encountering and eliminating sudden violence, tailed by a detective, Jake (Peter Saargard) and his super-ambitious, brainier secretary, Myrna (Penelope Cruz). The bare scaffolding of a cat-and-mouse game between the two pairs is what lends the film an excuse of a structure, but The Bride! seems particularly plagued by artistic indecision in the worst, indulgent manner conceivable. Jake Gyllenhaal serves a charming cameo merely to buttress Frank’s obsession with musicals, ostensibly to prop the film’s self-reflexivity. However, its parts are way too inchoate and jerkily orchestrated to guarantee any momentum. Gyllenhaal tosses in a loose, perfunctory seedy mob subplot to activate stakes in a film that gets tediously dull very quickly. When The Bride! skates on thin ice, it randomly plugs in unimaginative musical sequences to distract with dazzle that never glistens. Shelley looms every now and then to rouse the Bride into further rowdy defiance. However, this author-creation interface never reaches a provocative peak, only regurgitating a needlessly stylised, shallow litany of female disobedience.
Gyllenhaal isn't able to harness the punk, erratic energy into any recognisable critique. It feels all over the place. An easy bet is the violence men commit without consequence, which the Bride is hankering to expose. She’s on a trail of revenge without knowing herself. So she flinches when there are unexpected casualties. Gyllenhaal’s script, despite being entirely concentrated on the Bride’s perspective, never quite fleshes her with tact, emotional roundedness or intuition. She sees the Bride through an electrically embodied lens, the corporeal alone. Hence, Buckley gets more hijacked by physically throwing herself through a loud, frantic transformation than edge close to the Bride’s disorientation, or her awe at a buzzing New York City. Bale mines a deeper, more sincere, plangent emotion and vulnerability, though the film determinedly looks past him.
But The Bride! is too cacophonous for its finer statements to be heard. Gyllenhaal wants to yank at your nerves, dial all the buttons, summon the collective fury of womanhood but ditches the chief memo itself. How does the resurrected Bride find her voice without being brutalised into rebellion? How does her identity gather itself? The Bride screams a lot, but her anger and ache are cloven from too vague beats to register. Consequently, the film strains to set the Bride up as a symbol of public resistance against misogyny and violence, but it just comes off as an empty, woke gesture.
Abrasive and disjointed to an overkill, The Bride! is a punishing slog. Once the occasional visual explosion fades, it's repetitive and frankly appalling to see a woman subject to violence again and again with Gyllenhaal's touted justification for mirroring reality. It seems to be the director’s only go-to tool for creating shock. What is cinematic violence if not hollow and humiliating when it only re-stages assault but shies from interrogating? The front of being radical and daring chips away to hold up a conservative, dated rape-revenge track of a woman empowering herself only after being relentlessly preyed on. Buckley screeches and hams and howls like the whole might of investing reason and logic into the film has been hosed on her. It's as exhausting as annoying to watch an actor of her calibre being spent on pure caterwauling and endless histrionics. There’s a grand irony in watching Buckley being so near an Oscar win for Hamnet while also having delivered the most studied, overwrought performance here.
