"Narrated by the wayward ghost of Mary Shelley, Gyllenhaal's loopy, overstuffed fable is maddeningly uneven and just plain mad, in both the furious and off-its-rocker sense. I liked it more than any movie I've also considered walking out of."
"Despite achieving literary immortality of a kind few of her contemporaries could rival, this Shelley is a restless phantom, still furious about being held back by the patriarchal norms that required her to publish her best-known work without her name on it, not to mention the brain tumor that is thought to have taken her life at 53."
"So, she tells the camera from a black-and-white netherworld, she's back to finish what she started, the way she would have if circumstances hadn't held her back. It's Frankenstein, unbound."
Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! is a loopy, overstuffed reimagining of Frankenstein narrated by Mary Shelley's ghost. The film explores Shelley's frustration with patriarchal constraints that forced her to publish anonymously, her brain tumor death at 53, and the degradation of her creation into pop-culture kitsch. Gyllenhaal directs with possessed energy, having Shelley periodically seize control of the heroine's body to finish what circumstances prevented her from completing. The film is maddeningly uneven and deliberately chaotic, yet earns its exclamation point through audacious ambition. While Gyllenhaal's approach seems presumptuous in correcting Shelley's work, the film transcends narrow literary salvage through its bold vision.
Read at Slate Magazine
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