It’s been repeated to the point of meme status that Frankenstein is the name of the inventor, not his most famous creation. That’s still a better cultural fate than for the Bride of Frankenstein to be relegated to history as the wife of a monster forever tied to the monster that made him—a dehumanization on top of a dehumanization. And Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! has us believe that the ghost of Mary Shelley is very, very pissed about that.
The film’s opening minutes fade to the ghostly image of Shelley (Jessie Buckley) explaining that she has unfinished business with her most well-known creation, ravaged by the anger and hatred that went unpoured into her writing, and seeing an opportunity to correct that. That opportunity comes in 1930s Chicago, when a woman named Ida (also played by Buckley) is punched down a flight of stairs by a man just for saying no to his advances, only to be dug up and resurrected by a self-described mad scientist named Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), by request of Frankenstein’s aging, achingly lonely monster (Christian Bale).
Ida, like Shelley, has been choking on the world’s various injustices against women for years, and when Shelley decides to inject herself into Ida, the sheer volume of their combined bile spills out of her in Tourettes-like fits, spasms, and literary echolalia. And just to put a literal button on the whole metaphor that Gyllenhaal is playing with here, a vomity, ink-like substance stains Ida’s face, making it seem like she’s doing the world’s messiest Crow cosplay.
Messy, really, is a good word to describe The Bride! It’s a shotgun blast of a movie with no fealty to the conventions of modern gothic horror. There are no “It’s alive” moments here or visual nods to James Whale. Instead, we get no less than three solemn tips of the hat to Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, one of which turns into a full-fledged Lady Gaga-style dance routine. Gyllenhaal’s monster is unshackled in every conceivable way, while Buckley plays the Bride as a roaring, feral expression of every single repressed female thought and emotion.
Gyllenhaal’s only real fealty is to the emotions of her protagonist, who’s hell-bent on defying the world that destroyed her, and the film’s aesthetics are keyed to that desire. Having been briefly to the afterlife gives the Bride the ability to conjure the memories of murdered women on demand, and as a protective reflex, her tics tell her to shoot cops on sight. In a standout sequence, so infused with an infectious punk energy, the Bride’s consummation with Frankie is intercut with a montage of newspaper clippings with ’90s band names, mixed in with a shot of women copying the Bride’s makeup, arming themselves with guns, razors, and baseball bats.
The only man the film doesn’t hold in deep contempt is Frankenstein’s monster. Certainly he’s the only one who actually struggles against his base, violent instincts. The Bride! holds him accountable when he does wrong—particularly for the way he takes advantage of the resurrected Ida’s amnesia—but it also reacts warmly to his sincere attempts to be a good man, to be a worthwhile companion to the Bride, to be human, seeing it as beautiful.
The Bride!’s aims to show that being good in a cruel world is as foolish as falling in love—as foolish as attempting to be out and proud freaks in a repressive society. Guillermo del Toro might be brave enough to let his monsters fight and fuck in their own defense, but Gyllenhaal and her monsters do it nastier, sloppier, and louder as an act of magnificent defiance.
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