"It's a film that uses James Whale's 1935 classic Bride of Frankenstein as the jumping-off point for a horror-gangster-musical-romance mashup starring Jessie Buckley as the titular reanimated character and Christian Bale as Frank, her stitched-together swain. Whatever its other qualities, The Bride! is unquestionably a huge swing of a movie, one that kicks off with Mary Shelley herself speaking to the camera from a black-and-white purgatory."
"It takes a lot of chutzpah to start your movie by having the ghost of a long-dead author, adorned with a tumble of white hair in a tribute to Elsa Lanchester, inform the audience that the story she really wanted to tell was not the masterpiece of fiction she's most famous for, nor any of the writing she published after it, but the contents of the film we're about to watch."
"It's also an incoherent disaster - and not of the noble folly variety. It leaves you with the sinking feeling of watching someone fight their way to the front of a crowd to speak, only to realize when the spotlight is finally on them that they're not actually sure what to say."
The Bride! is Maggie Gyllenhaal's second directorial effort, a genre-blending film starring Jessie Buckley as a reanimated bride and Christian Bale as Frank, her monster companion. The film opens with Mary Shelley's ghost claiming the story being told is what she truly wanted to write, before possessing the main character Ida. Set in an anachronistic 1930s, the narrative follows two monsters as folk heroes reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde. The film incorporates musical numbers, gangster elements, and romance while referencing classic cinema. Despite its enormous ambition and creative audacity, the film struggles with narrative coherence, leaving viewers with the impression of someone with much to say but lacking clarity in their message.
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