Reviewed: “The Bride!”
The narrative flip from the book’s Gothic Europe to post-Prohibition Chicago is a kitschy and vibrant reimagining.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” is a hot mess — both the title character and the film. It’s a wildly ambitious project with a distinctive female lens, and while it’s rife with social commentary, those themes often feel stitched on — and at times, carelessly so. The film flounders despite a killer cast, including Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard, and her brother, Jake, who appear in supporting roles. But the main reason to see the film is the bravura headline by Jessie Buckley, who’s been nominated for a best actress Oscar for her deeply emotional portrait of grief in “Hamnet” (2025).
Buckley can do no wrong in “The Bride!” She previously partnered with Gyllenhaal for her critically acclaimed directorial debut “The Lost Daughter” (2021), for which Buckley received a best supporting actress nod. Here she carries the film’s heaviest load, both as the shadowy visage of “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley hurling barbs of foreboding from a dark dreamscape, and as Ida, a brash flapper-era Chicagoan party girl whose demise leads to her reincarnation — or “reinvigoration” in the film — as the bride.
The narrative flip from the book’s Gothic Europe to post-Prohibition Chicago is a kitschy and vibrant reimagining. It also allows the face of the patriarchy to be embodied by an Al-Capone-fashioned gangster who silences misbehaving party girls by offing them and/or cutting their tongues out, keeping them as trophies in an array of well-displayed jars — which may stylistically explain why the bride’s tongue is ink black.
It’s Ida’s outspokenness (she’s ostensibly possessed by the shrieking spirit of Shelley) when she goes bonkers at a nightclub — pointing out a handjob taking place under the table, barfing up oysters on a mobster and shining a very public light on another kingpin’s litany of criminal misdeeds — that ultimately puts her six feet under. Her resurrection comes at the behest of Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale, not quite as alluring as Jacob Elordi in last year’s take on Shelley by Guillermo del Toro), more casually known in the film as “Frank.” He’s in town to connect with Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening putting the female gaze on the creator’s role), the one scientist in the world he believes can cure his loneliness by animating him a companion from the dead.
The design of Bale’s monster shoots for a harder, gorier take on Boris Karloff’s seminal classic, replete with forehead staples and gaping facial deformities. The bride, on the other hand, is a gothed-out Cyndi Lauper imbued with the mercurial inflections of Harley Quinn. It’s a chaotic potpourri of personality tics that Buckley bites into with relish and carries off with aplomb — she’s not given much, but she spins gold from straw.
For fun, Frank and Ida like to go to the cinema and watch Ronnie Reed movies — fictional takes on Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers pictures. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Reed both on the screen and later, in person, at a New York social gathering. At the gala, Ida and Frank, pursued by the police and posing as wait staff, break into dance — a scene emblematic of the picture’s overall excess.
Throughout the film, violence against women is a pervasive undercurrent. When Frank finally ditches his civil, cuck sheen and takes a stand against a pair of punks harassing Ida (he bashes their heads in), the film morphs into a Bonnie-and-Clyde, lovers-on-the-run flick — sexual dysfunction and all — with Ida ascending to the rank of feminist folk hero and tagged in the headlines as a “Twisted Sister” inspiring copycat “Violent Femmes.”
Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz play detectives on the case, but Cruz’s Myrna, the force’s sharpest, is ignored because she’s a woman. Gyllenhaal effusively tosses around cross-cultural references and social issues. Some land, but others — including the late specter of #MeToo — fall flat or evince groans, not insight.
Notable in smaller bits are Cambridge’s own Matthew Maher as a mid-level mobster and Jeanie Berlin as Euphronious’ creepy Morticia Adams-like maid/assistant.
In the 1935 “Bride of Frankenstein,” itself a direct sequel to “Frankenstein” (1931), director James Whale and his collaborators also cast the same actress (Elsa Lanchester) to play both the parts of Shelley and the bride. She, too, had a stunning shock of white hair and an air of gothic glam. But in the 1935 film, The Bride appears for mere minutes — and never speaks. Gyllenhaal’s reimagining is a feminist anthem that screams at the patriarchy. Her aim is true, but it’s buried in spectacle.
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