The Bride!
I had a feeling like I had just been brought back to life and the very first thing I saw was The Bride!. Because that sense of not understanding what was going on never really left me throughout the entire movie.
The story follows Frankenstein’s monster, who has taken the name of his creator and travels to Chicago in the 1930s to see Doctor Euphronious. He’s lonely, sad, and he wants a woman. Through persuasion and a bit of manipulation, he convinces the doctor to dig someone up from a grave — and, in the most casual way possible, bring her back to life, as if it’s nothing unusual at all. Frankenstein then manipulates her as well, simply because he wants someone beside him. But the newly resurrected Bride turns out to be far from simple: with strange quirks, habits, and traumas that have carried over into the afterlife, the pair begin what feels like a cheerful little criminal romance with elements of an action movie.
I went into this film with my usual minimal expectations, but I’ll admit I was genuinely excited after the concept and the trailers. So I won’t drag this out: this turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments I’ve had in the last several years.
Let’s start with the good. The acting. Jessie Buckley as the Bride, Christian Bale as Frank — Frankenstein’s monster — plus Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, and Penélope Cruz. Some more, some less, but everyone generally handled their roles. The central duo of Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale is great. No one doubts that they’re strong actors who can handle whatever is written for them.
The problem here is exactly that — what they were given to play.
Almost everything happening on screen feels strange at best and grotesque at worst. But not grotesque in the way you might imagine. It’s grotesque in the way some of Ryan Murphy’s worst television projects feel grotesque.
At first you also need time to adjust to the look of this version of Frankenstein’s monster. Just a couple of months ago we saw a very strong performance of this character elsewhere. This one looks almost too human — apart from the big scars on his face there’s very little that would realistically make people faint at the mere sight of him, as the film suggests they might.
Then there’s the decision to tell part of the story through Mary Shelley. It feels completely out of place and very strange. Her inner voice, the fact that she’s also played by Jessie Buckley, the idea that she’s imagining all of this and essentially pulling a character out of literary reality into the real world — where the true creator is not Victor Frankenstein but Mary Shelley herself, the writer who created her Bride. The whole thing ends up feeling like one long narcotic trip.
Turning the film into a sort of half-musical with dance numbers and attempts at songs is also extremely frustrating. Instead of showing that the Bride has deep trauma or is searching for herself, the film seems to borrow the foundation of what Emma Stone did so brilliantly in Poor Things. But instead of creating a layered character, they simply give Jessie Buckley’s Bride total insanity. Endless speeches into the void, random quotes, strange mannerisms — they try to build a character, but in the end she becomes almost a joke.
Frank, the monster, ends up being just another simple man trying to use a woman. Meanwhile the Bride is turned into a symbol of feminism, and her trauma is reduced almost entirely to her desire to fight for justice for women, which somehow sparks a kind of global Pussy Riot moment. Let’s be honest: the importance of that theme is undeniable, and I’m ready to support it in every way. But the way it’s inserted here feels awkward, forced, and completely disconnected from what’s happening on screen and from what the Bride herself is actually doing.
Instead of showing two beings who don’t belong in the world of the living trying to find themselves in each other, the film turns into something that feels like a parody of Bonnie and Clyde — like a Lana Del Rey music video from 2012, with quick cuts, running from cops, shooting back, and trying to have sex in the middle of the chaos. We spend a huge amount of time on empty conversations, dancing, and stylized grotesque moments instead of actually developing the characters. By the end of the film they still have no real depth. We don’t understand why the Bride chooses Frank. Frank himself remains a dumb brute, just like most of the other men around him. Side characters constantly make irrational decisions.
And then, in the finale, the film suddenly resurrects characters who have already died twice, simply for the sake of a cute romantic ending. Just because it’s supposed to feel sweet.
I honestly don’t know what Maggie Gyllenhaal was thinking when creating this version of the Bride. For me, nothing in this film works except the acting — and even that works mostly because the roles are played by very talented actors. And that’s the saddest part. This world has so many legends, so much lore, so much potential for a deep and beautiful story. Instead we get something that feels like it probably belonged on the FX channel, not in a big-budget cinema release.
3.5/10
