The Bride! review: monstrously good fun

A deliberately monstrous, on-the-broken-nose needle drop closes out astonishing actor-turned-remarkable-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore feature, The Bride!

On the way home, I couldn’t help singing along to a song from a very different ode to the constantly transmogrifying horror genre, The Rocky Horror Show’s toe-tapping Time Warp.

‘With a bit of a mind flip, you’re into the time slip, and nothing can ever be the same.’

It was because Gyllenhaal’s fired-up reimagining of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s Promethean cautionary tale, is a much stranger beast than you might anticipate.

Beyond the veil

In 1935’s truly iconic Universal monster movie, The Bride of Frankenstein, queer filmmaker James Whale introduced the reality-blurring mirror of Elsa Lanchester playing both the author and the titular character. Gyllenhaal also harnesses this uncanny doppelgänger effect, with Jessie Buckley, Oscar nominee and likely winner for Hamnet, depicting both women.

But her Mary isn’t Lanchester’s youthful version, the one who penned Frankenstein as a dare on a dark and stormy night at the Villa Diodati. Instead, her Mary is eternally 53, post-death by suspected brain tumour, trapped in what appears to be a void-like limbo.

Beyond the boundaries of reality itself, time slips, changing everything.

Determined to live again by rewriting her tragedy, Shelley pushes through the veil by the sheer force of her mighty intellect. A force powerful enough to cross dimensions, though we’ll learn later that the walls between worlds have already been weakened.

Alighting in a timeline where her fiction is truth, Shelley possesses the body and soul of Buckley’s gangster’s moll, Ida. It’s 1931 and she’s cavorting in a Chicago restaurant frequented by a malignant mob boss.

Finding a bride

As the author’s non-consensual time share takes hold, Ida writhes on the dinner table. Buckley, an actor capable of seemingly elemental ecstasies, ejects oysters onto the striped shirt of Matthew Maher’s heavy. He’s as startled as we are at Ida’s feral spasms, her nasal Great Lakes tones switching to Shelley’s plummy, rumbly RP and back.

This scene thrusts us into granular colour, a not-quite-real world akin to Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. It’s a discombobulating shift from Shelley’s opening monologue, which is held tight in black and white by Joker cinematographer Lawrence Sher.

As universes collide, Ida-Mary is bullishly ushered out of the dining room by Maher and a fellow fixer, played by First Cow star John Magaro, and takes a calamitous tumble down the staircase, captured in sick-making slow-mo until she’s sprawled lifeless on the tiled floor below, a mess of broken limbs.

But this indignity will not be her last.

Monster mash-up

In this timeline, Christian Bale’s festering wound-stapled Monster, now going by ‘Frank’, survived his trial by pitchfork, skulking in the darkness for decades and still hankering for a mate with whom to do more than endure his exile – a kindness denied him by his (presumably now dead) ‘father’, the overreaching and uncaring Victor Frankenstein.

Which brings him to Doctor Euphronius’ door, with the out-of-time creature surprised to discover that the good physician is a woman.

Played with haughty kookiness by 20th Century Women star Annette Benning, Euphronius dabbles in both quantum mechanics – time is slipping – and the study of cadaverous reanimation. Rather than be startled by Frank’s hulking figure, she’s determined to take him under her wing, and microscope.

But Frank has no interest in being a lab monkey, convincing Euphronius, against her gut instincts, to go gravedigging with him to ‘reinvigorate’ Ida’s freshly buried corpse. Another non-consensual takeover, with echoes of the trial faced by Emma Stone’s ‘monster’ in Yorgos Lanthimos’ adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things.

Ida-Mary is awoken by Euphronius in Gyllenhaal’s lower-key take than Whale’s 1935 movie or Guillermo del Toro’s recent revisitation of the material, but there’s no lack of vision or ambition in her rendition.

Watch the trailer

An odyssey of sorts

Buckley is electric in the central role. Much like Whale’s cameo star and Stone’s protagonist, her bride is at first unwilling to play the good wife to Bale’s Monster, and is instead set on self-determined emancipation.

She will take on several names, including Penelope – a moniker that cannot fail but catapult us backwards through collapsing time to The Odyssey via Margaret Atwood and James Joyce.

Gyllenhaal’s playful film littered with literary nods. One intertextuality, glimpsed on graffiti-strewn walls, is the chalked-up sum 2 + 2 + 5, almost 20 years, in-universe, before the publication of George Orwell’s 1984. Frayed posters allude to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. There’s also mention of Moby-Dick writer Herman Melville, another author invested in humanity’s self-defeating obsession with monsters.

Like Jacob Elordi and Boris Karloff’s takes, Bale’s monster is a gentle soul beneath his brutally stitched-up frame. Beyond his desecration of her grave, he has no desire to seize the bride’s body as his own.

Instead, he’ll wait bashfully as they hit freaky-deak clubs on the wrong side of town. (Look out for an ace appearance by Fever Ray.) But with the mob unhappy at Ida’s apparently unfinished business, and with handsy clubbers bringing on a violent set-to, they’re soon on the run like Bonnie and Clyde in this propulsively weird neo-noir.

Gyllenhaal also presses family into service. Her real-life partner, Peter Sarsgaard, plays a crumpled detective a little too softly. Its slack that’s more than picked up by the magnetic Penélope Cruz, who plays his sassy secretary, Myrna Mallow. She’s clearly better at the gig than he is as they pursue the wanted creatures from one city to the next.

Gyllenhaal’s brother, Jake, also pops up in a fun recurring role as all-singing, all-dancing actor Ronnie Reed, with a hint of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. A big screen star who can count Bale’s lonely monster as his less-than-welcome number one fan.

Gothic via grunge

Much wilder in spirit than Gyllenhaal’s also feminist-fired debut feature – the Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter, which also featured Buckley – The Bride! is a ferociously stylish beast with a bleeding heart.

Making the most of its New York location shoot, the unruly film leans into its oddity, strung together by Sandy Powell’s magnificent costume designs. Her work burns brightest on Buckley, who’s adorned in laddered blue tights and a rust-coloured dress that’s past its best. It’s a look amplified by Kay Georgiou and Nadia Stacey’s sterling hair and makeup.

The bride’s frazzled locks echo Lanchester’s lightning-struck do, as does Shelley’s crumpled feather headdress. The ink-stained black of the bride’s regurgitated rejuvenating fuel, splattered artfully across her lips, fingers and body, is akin to the Joker’s cruel smile, as she teeters from confused innocence to embracing this world’s darkness, a fate spurred on by the parasitic presence of the author burrowed inside her.

Anachronistic music crackles in and out alongside period-appropriate ditties by the Gershwins, all stitched together by Hildur Guðnadóttir’s reverberating score. Just one more sign that time and truth are fracturing, as Gyllenhaal’s grungy gothic triumph, championed by Buckley’s brilliance, walks us down the aisle with The Bride!

The Bride! releases in cinemas on 5 March.

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