The Bride! review – Do the monster mash-up

If you had to use one word to describe The Bride! it would be “mad.” Or, maybe, “wild.” In her second feature effort behind the camera, actress turned director and screenwriter Maggie Gyllenhaal has stitched together crime noir, a homage to Hollywood Golden Age horror, star-crossed romance and a hefty dose of feminine rage. The assemblage is often clumsily done, turning The Bride! into a bipolar beast, but it does mean the film is never boring. And no matter what, it ends up feeling like what Joker: Folie à Deux should have been.

Right from the start, The Bride! makes it clear how unconstrained it’s going to be. Not only does killed good time girl Ida (Jessie Buckley) have to deal with amnesia that comes from returning from the dead, but she has Frankenstein author Mary Shelley (also played by Buckley) in her head. Whether it’s the result of the brain tumour that killed her, or the decades spent sitting impotent in some shadowy corner of the afterlife, Shelley, though Ida, is prone to Tourette’s style outbursts of unfiltered honesty and wants. It’s a jarring creative choice, but it does spotlight the talent of Irish Buckley – currently Oscar nominated for Hamnet – as she alters accent and physicality in some scenes from breath to breath.

Speaking of talent, The Bride! is an all-star affair, with Christian Bale as brutal but sympathetic “Frank”, the monster who has taken on the name of his creator, and who turns to pioneering scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to give him a mate after a century of loneliness. Cue a reanimated Bonnie and Clyde crime spree that takes Frank and The Bride from 1930s Chicago to New York City and beyond. In pursuit are police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) with his assistant Myrna (Penélope Cruz), who is a far more skilled investigator than her boss – and who emerges as one of the best things about the film. Rounding out the cast are familiar faces like Jake Gyllenhaal, John Magaro, and Zlatko Burić, while Jeannie Berlin snares viewers’ attention as Euphronious’s enigmatic maid Greta.

A lot of ideas are stuffed into The Bride! and almost none are probed. For example, the title character is a very different monster to Frank, revived whole – by a woman scientist it must be said –instead of being sewn together from parts. The Bride is briefly shown as having electric powers, as well as the ability to channel the voices of dead women who were the victims of sexual violence (a warning that there’s a lot of it here), and sexist injustice in general. This turns her into a feminist icon, complete with rallying mantra used by her followers, but there are a whole two scenes devoted to this story arc, and the audience never learns what The Bride feels about being placed on a pedestal.

The film even includes a frenetic dance number, and it’s unclear whether the sequence is the product of The Bride using her supernatural abilities, or simply Frank being sucked into one of his feel-good fantasies – a mental escape developed after years of isolation and ostracism.

The overload of concepts, without clarity, in The Bride! isn’t actually a problem, to be fair. It’s the kind of movie that seems designed for dissection with fellow viewers after the screening. That’s a large part of the fun. The bigger issue is how distractingly inconsistent the film is on a narrative level. Characters will be set up with strong opinions on a topic, only to flip on a dime, making it feel like the start and end of a scene were written months apart.

Because if its ADHD attitude to, well, everything, it becomes difficult to work out what The Bride! is trying to say, and who it wants to speak to. Shot for IMAX, the film is high-style, big budget affair with vast sets and backlot recreations gratifyingly prioritised over CGI. However, The Bride! is also a bit too eccentric in its creative choices – a good percentage of an uncomfortable nature – to be considered blockbuster mainstream. Throughout The Bride!, Mary Shelley challenges the resuscitated Ida to choose her name, and Gyllenhaal’s film seems be grappling with that exact same dilemma. It gets there in the end, and with considerable entertainment value, but boy is the result a muddled curiosity.

The Bride! is in cinemas now, having released on Friday, 6 March.