The cool thing about a text as old and revered as Frankenstein is that it’s already been adapted and reinterpreted so many times that anyone who tackles it pretty much has free rein to do whatever they want with it. Even so, you still have your purists: your “well actually Frankenstein was the doctor’s name” or your “as a man, Guillermo del Toro doesn’t really have the perspective to properly adapt it” types. But what those fun-haters must remember is that even the most iconic iteration, James Whale’s 1931 film, holds very little resemblance to Shelley’s novel, so they’ll have to just deal with the fact that ol’ Frankie kinda belongs to everyone now, and Shelley’s excellent novel (which she herself updated at one point) is still available for anyone to read. The fact of the matter is that Frankenstein is so deeply intertwined with our culture that even the concept of a “Frankenstein story” doesn’t necessarily guarantee an appearance by the titular Doctor or his undead buddy. The term has now come to mean any tale where a mad creator relents to hubris and is soon overpowered by their creation. Jurassic Park is a Frankenstein story, as is Poor Things, as is Robocop. The list could go on forever.
Here’s where I recommend The Skin I Live In. Go in blind.
With The Bride!, writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal exhibits a deep well of knowledge and reverence for not just Frankenstein proper, but the endless parade of weird science stories that have manifested in its wake. Yes, there is even a sly reference to Young Frankenstein. The petri dish of influences which gave birth to this bizarre, high-energy film goes deep, with the most obvious being Sid & Nancy, Bonnie & Clyde, and yes, even Joker Folie á Deux. At one point, which I can’t go into much detail without spoiling, Lovecraftian cosmic horror is invoked upon in a fun, deliciously ambiguous way.
There’s a lot going on here, perhaps too much, but it’s all so exciting and fun and thoughtful for me to ding it too hard. The film similar to a lot of things, but there’s nothing quite like it. The Bride! is a feminist-minded sci-fi horror-romance-road trip-sorta musical, and despite overflowing with ambition, the “too much” feeling is ultimately an asset. What I’m saying is that Gyllenhaal took a bunch of disparate pieces, assembled them into a monster, and then shot it full of electricity. How appropriate!
The film opens in black and white, with Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley, embracing the same dual role that Elsa Lanchester did in the 1935 film) lamenting that she died before telling all of the stories she’d wished to tell. If only she could find a way to affect the living once again. She decides a possession is the way to go, and chooses Ida (Jessie Buckley) to be her medium. Long story short, this sudden intrusion of a second entity leads to Ida’s untimely death at the hands of mobsters, and by sheer coincidence, it’s her body that is selected for reanimation by Frank (Christian Bale) and Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening). Frank is Frankenstein’s monster, complete with all the assumed history that comes with his identity (at one point he references how traumatic it is to be chased by a torch mob), and he’s lonely enough to request a wife. I assumed that this would kick off an “incel Frankenstein” story, but the film doesn’t quite go there — he’s a sensitive creature, and while he desires a partner so heartily as to build one, he never acts like it’s owed to him … which makes him more human than most of the men in this movie, all beasts of consumption and entitlement.
Soon, the Bride is alive, she and Frank are in love, and a duo of detectives (Penelope Cruz & Peter Sarsgaard) are hot on their decomposing tails as they unleash murder and mayhem on 1930s America, inspiring in their wake a movement of women rejecting patriarchal oppression. It’s WILD.
It’s no surprise that Buckley is absolutely fantastic in the titular role. She’s an actress who knows how to go big without swallowing the screen, and here she bounces between the confused and inquisitive Ida and the bombastic, opinionated Mary Shelley with fiery intensity. Both personalities inhabit the reanimated flesh, and as the film progresses, the two modes batter each other into an equilibrium, moving from what feels like two people to one singular chaotic personality. It’s a marvelous character journey that helps to pave over the fact that the film is essentially a road movie with no apparent destination. To be fair, there is a narrative thrust to it: the duo is on the run, and Frank is trying to see as many films starring his favorite celebrity, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal in a quietly unhinged performance), as possible, and it puts the couple at many a movie house across a handful of cities. This gives their travels a shape, but it’s hardly the Emerald Kingdom.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s direction has an effervescence to it that indicates a filmmaker having the most fun bringing her vision to the screen. From the dreamy, cosmic black and white limbo at the film’s outset, to the buzzing neon lights of 1930’s New York City, to the smoky nightclubs of ill repute, to the open farmland of the Midwest — it’s a diverse variety of visual modalities that Gyllenhaal employs, and in less skilled hands it would be a mess. Heck, some would argue that it is a mess, but I’d argue back that is a pointed one. Humans are messy, and the monsters they create even more so. A tale about human-made monsters trying to find their humanity within a flawed human world has to be messy.
The Bride! is one of those films that I lament writing a review for after just a single viewing. There’s a lot going on here, so it’s tough to tell which of the rough edges are intentional, which are mistakes, and which aren’t rough at all, existing in my imagination as a result of not yet knowing how to watch the movie. The most glaring issue for me came at the film’s midpoint, when there’s a montage of women reacting to the news of the Bride’s crime spree with their own anarchic behavior. It’s AWESOME, but it’s a fruit that dies on the vine. I wonder if maybe it was more fleshed out on the page and had to be sacrificed in the final edit. There’s a subplot involving Penélope Cruz’s female detective consistently being underestimated by her inferior male counterparts, and it would’ve been very cool to see her reacting to the justifiable movement as a law enforcement agent while also feeling the same level of inspiration from the undead feminist icon.
This, again, may smooth out on subsequent viewings — the arc that Cruz’s Myrna Malloy traverses is indeed paid off very well, so I can assume any lapses were not thoughtless excisions. I guess I just wanted more of her. She gives a hell of a performance. And really, I WILL be watching this again.
The Bride! is sure to be a divisive film, and it will inspire many Halloween costumes later this year (which I am here for — the costume/character design is top tier). I am pleased to find myself on the positive side of the divide. After the failed Monsterverse, the canned Bill Condon adaptation, and the endless conversations about whether GDT’s Frankenstein did or didn’t do the text justice, it’s exciting to see the material worked into something fresh and unique. If I wanted something just like everything else, I’d just go see everything else. I like when a filmmaker says “fuck it, I’m doing my own thing, source material be damned.”
Nearly a century out from the original Bride of Frankenstein, at a time where patriarchal forces are really showing their ass on a global scale, it’s about time someone shook things up a bit with the material, and used it to say something worthwhile.
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
Written by Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard
Rated R, 126 minutes
