In 1930s Chicago, Frankenstein asks Dr. Euphronius to help create a companion. They give life to a murdered woman as the Bride, sparking romance, police interest, and radical social change.
So we’ve already had a ‘Frankenstein’ movie in the last few months from Guillermo del Toro, a fairly conventional take in terms of mood and setting albeit with a key twist on the core narrative. It is safe to say that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride!’, while featuring the Frankenstein character prominently, is a very different beast if you’ll pardon the pun! Starring the Best Actress frontrunner Jessie Buckley in the leading role, it tells the story of a reanimated woman who goes on a crime spree through 1930s America with Frankenstein, played by Christian Bale. The movie has been slated and is already being called a box office bomb, but I thought it was alright, which I guess is a bit of fence sitting but I didn’t feel particularly strongly either way!
It begins with the death of a woman called Ida (Buckley) in Chicago on the orders of a mafia boss after she badmouths him while in a trance – a trance that was brought on by Mary Shelley herself possessing the woman. Yes this is the kind of thing that happens in ‘The Bride!’. Shortly afterwards, Frankenstein (or ‘Frank’) arrives in Chicago seeking out a scientist who has worked on reanimation, with the hope that she will create a wife for him after over 100 years of loneliness. Circumstances therefore bring Ida/The Bride and Frank/Frankenstein together, though it isn’t long before they find that living amongst normal society will not be possible and going on the run is their only hope. This sets in chain a series of events where they murder their way across the country with shades of ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ (with less bank robbing) or ‘Natural Born Killers’, while a couple of detectives and the mafia try to hunt them down. Oh, and Maggie’s brother Jake features as a famous movie star who Frank is obsessed with, because why not?
What it is fair to say about ‘The Bride!’ is it is certainly unconventional and that in some respects worked in its favour for me, if you can look past some of the inherent silliness and faux pretentiousness that are core parts of its story. The first thing I liked is the central performances, with Buckley having an absolute scream as the central character, and Christian Bale a good foil as a movie loving, romantic take on Frankenstein, and the support is mostly good fun if a little miscast in some regards (Penelope Cruz as a 1930s Chicago Detective for example!). It pushes and pulls in so many different directions that I’m not sure even Gyllenhaal knows what she was trying to bring together here, and it wouldn’t be unfair to say the script is frankly all over the place and a bit of a mess.
Yet, that messiness was endearing up to a point, when meshed together with Buckley and Bale’s gonzo performances, and I think my enduring feeling coming away from ‘The Bride!’ is that it was incredibly flawed and by most measures not particularly good, but I thought it was largely good fun all the same. So make of that what you will!
Rating: 3/5
Directed By: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jeannie Berlin, John Magaro, Matthew Maher, Zlatko Burić, Julianne Hough, Louis Cancelmi and Penélope Cruz
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