The Bride of Frankenstein lives for only five minutes or so of her 1935 movie. She never speaks a word. A hiss. A scream. And, with that, her creators recognise her abhorrence and snuff out instantly the existence they toiled so hard to revive. If a filmmaker like Maggie Gyllenhaal were to lend that monstrous woman a voice, then why wouldn’t it belong to the star of her directorial debut, 2021’s The Lost Daughter, and a soon-to-be Oscar winner, Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley?
In The Bride! (note the exclamation point), Buckley is a mass-destructive cyclone of female rage, thrusting and spitting and ripping out tongues and pulling her skirt up and pointing a pistol sky high with tears in her eyes and an ink stain splattered across her lips like a gunshot wound. Buckley bleached her eyebrows for the role. That means there’s no escape here from those deep brown eyes. You start falling into them and never stop falling until you’ve been consumed entirely. If Hamnet proved the actor could tear down every barrier between herself and grief, then The Bride! does the very same with anger.
Her screaming, resuscitated corpse is brought back into 1930s Chicago to right, what Gyllenhaal would argue, is a cinematic wrong. She’s cavorting not through Gothic keeps and burning windmills, but grabbing the wrist of her fellow creature, Christian Bale’s Frank (the name borrowed from his father), for a Bonnie and Clyde-style offshoot.
Before death, The Bride was your standard gangster’s moll. But, revived by Dr Euphronious (Annette Bening) via an electrified, Joan of Arc chainmail chest plate, she becomes a figurehead for the “cracking” taking place inside women’s heads – a climactic explosion of repressed feeling that results in what Gyllenhaal has termed a “brain attack”. The Bride! depicts women’s rage as a righteous rebellion against the natural order, as opposed to the unnatural kind pursued by Frankenstein and co. She is, as Euphronious pleasingly phrases it, a piece of “disobedient geometry”.
To give The Bride her voice, and to imagine that voice might be angry, might make for a propulsive film, fuelled by Sandy Powell’s silky gowns, Karen Murphy’s steampunk designs, and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s keening score. But The Bride! is too easily distracted by its flash-bang machine gun and electric marquee world – there’s an entire detective subplot led by Peter Sarsgaard and an underserved Penélope Cruz – to make much sense out of its own manifesto. It presents female rage convincingly. But what does it have to say about it?
As a nod to the 1935 film, Gyllenhaal has Buckley play both The Bride and Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley, the latter here literally possessing the former, so that she periodically spits out bits of disconnected verse in an embittered, RP dialect. Gyllenhaal’s version of Shelley is brusque. Her real-life counterpart was notably introverted. Gyllenhaal’s version of Shelley rejects her 1818 novel as a “paucity”, not half of what “I wanted to write”, when her real-life counterpart continued to show pride in her work until her death.
It doesn’t strike me as much of a feminist act to disbelieve that a woman so meek in manner could contain all the horrors of Frankenstein, or to ignore the fact the novelist already expressed the particular barbarity of resurrecting a woman without consent by having Frankenstein destroy his bride before she took a single breath. In fact, it was men – director James Whale and screenwriter William Hurlbut – who pursued the act to completion and left her voiceless.
Yet The Bride! looks far more kindly on Frankenstein’s cinematic legacy. Bale’s performance is certainly Boris Karloff-adjacent, a creature bewildered by his own capacity for violence. And the character is shown to be a diehard fan of silver screen icon Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). When they inevitably cross paths, he tells him, “I credit you and you alone with my survival”, before breaking out into a rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” as a nod to Young Frankenstein (1974). There’s a playfulness there, and a real burst of imaginative thinking, but Gyllenhaal has regrettably pulled a Frankenstein herself. All those ideas, yet they haven’t quite stitched up together to make a beautiful corpse.
Dir: Maggie Gyllenhaal. Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz. Cert 15, 127 minutes.
‘The Bride!’ is in cinemas from 6 March
