‘The Bride!’ Review: A Beautiful, Unhinged Monster of a Movie

A lot of slander has been thrown at The Bride! since its release. Conversations about style over substance, messy screenplays, and basically every aspect feeling off. Is this an exaggeration though? The Bride! follows a murdered young woman who is brought back to life by a lonely Frankenstein and mad genius Dr. Euphronious in 1930s Chicago. With the intent to create her solely to be a life partner for Frank. Instead of falling into place, The Bride and Frank go on a whirlwind adventure of love, revolt, and cinema. It is hard to write a concise summary of this film because so much happens and you truly will never know what’s coming next. Read our full review for The Bride! below.

One of the main draws of The Bride! is the two lead performances by Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale. Of course, Buckley is the titular Bride, but she also plays the ghost of Mary Shelley. It is an extremely committed performance, and you can tell Buckley had a lot of fun with it, but I don’t know if it works completely. She is definitely one of the strongest parts of the movie and she gives it her all, but at times it felt like a little much. She is three characters in one, making it a lot to juggle, but also making it hard to pin her down. The Bride felt very confused and like she actually cared for Frank, but then Mary Shelley would possess her and say something insane or make her do something crazy. I couldn’t pin her down and ended up feeling a little frustrated at parts, wanting the titular Bride to get a moment to shine through. Then there is Bale, who plays a lonely Frankenstein, and I will have to say I was pleasantly surprised by him. It is a sweet side of male loneliness that we do not get on screen all the time and Bale plays it perfectly. Though he looks like a cartoon character at times, I think he really grounded the film in a way. I also, as a cinema lover, enjoyed Frank’s love for cinema and really resonated with that. It was a great reflection on the parasocial relationship that can form between one and a film or actor. I wish it had focused more on this simpler aspect of the story more, because after a while it just became a narrative device that bored me. 

The Bride! as a film is a different monster in itself. It is long, insane, and very overt in its messages. Though I think there is a lot of good, there also is a lot of bad. This is mostly due to the screenplay, which is jumbled and not subtle. It takes big swings, and most of there aren’t home runs. There are just too many ideas on the page. There is the Mary Shelley possession aspect, the Bonnie and Clyde love story, The Bride’s personal revolution, a mob boss storyline, the love letter to cinema, the detective story, and if you can even believe it, more. This desperately needed an editor and a few characters trimmed from the story. The one thing that I will give the film is that a lot of it is interesting and entertaining, but it means nothing if the complete work cannot decide what it wants to be. This film feels like five films frankensteined together, which is interesting in itself, and it is almost grotesquely beautiful how unhinged this movie is. It leaves you wondering how it got made, but I argue that it is amazing that this was made. 

If you can’t tell, I am a bit perplexed by The Bride! It is objectively not the best film of all time, but there is something charming about it. It really feels like Maggie Gyllenhaal was given free reign to make whatever she wanted, with a ninety million dollar budget. It’s inspiring to see a big studio like Warner Bros. greenlight and support a story and vision as wild as this. In a time when every big studio film feels unoriginal and by the books, The Bride! comes swinging in with big ideas, great visuals, and an epic story. Though it is not all perfect, it is not as atrocious as some people are making it seem. It is fun, it is unhinged, and it feels like a very distinct female voice, in the line of Jennifer’s Body and Barbie. I hope this movie does well, and I hope we see more big swings like this, but let’s just refine the screenplay a bit. 

The Bride! was written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and stars Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal, Annette Bening, and Peter Sarsgaard. The film was released on March 6.

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