'The Bride!' review: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s monster mash is far from a smash

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

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A movie that closes with the seminal Halloween novelty hit “Monster Mash” almost suggests a tongue-in-cheek campiness that never quite materializes beforehand. That sense of playful gothic mischief feels like the movie Maggie Gyllenhaal thinks she has made with “The Bride!” A punk rock feminist riff that gestures toward the anarchic romance of “Joker: Folie A Deux” and “Bonnie & Clyde,” it’s occasionally engaging and visually striking, but mostly lands as a flat, overstuffed affair that pads its runtime with indulgences like a mid-film musical number set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” The sequence is choreographed with some flair, but arrives precisely when the movie should be digging deeper into its story and characters.

Headlined by Best Actress frontrunner Jessie Buckley and the formidable Christian Bale, the film boasts an embarrassment of riches on the acting front. But even performers this good can only do so much with material that feels like it’s constantly fighting itself.

Gyllenhaal clearly set out to romanticize the allure of cinema itself. Those impulses are sprinkled throughout the film, but the final result plays like a genre mash-up stitched together from incompatible parts. There’s plenty of ambition here, especially considering the film was shot with IMAX cameras, but ambition alone cannot hold together a story this narratively scattered.

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel “Frankenstein” was already rich with themes that feel strikingly modern. It explored creation, abandonment, loneliness, and the consequences of men attempting to control life itself. The Bride herself, though only briefly mentioned in the novel, became an enduring icon through James Whale’s 1935 film “Bride of Frankenstein,” where Elsa Lanchester memorably played both Mary Shelley and the Bride. That film was subversive and slyly campy decades before such things were fashionable.

Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” clearly wants to build on those ideas, reframing the story through a modern feminist lens while leaning into its gothic roots. But instead of sharpening those themes, the movie buries them beneath an avalanche of half-developed subplots, tonal shifts, and campy eccentricities. It’s a film trying to be rebellious, romantic, grotesque, and mythic all at once. The result feels less like a bold reinvention and more like a cinematic patchwork.

Coming on the heels of Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-nominated “Frankenstein,” which played things largely straight as a faithful adaptation, “The Bride!” swings hard in the opposite direction. It opens with a black-and-white sequence in which Mary Shelley herself, played by Buckley, introduces the story. 

Then we jump to Chicago in 1936, where we meet Ida (Buckley), an escort working a gangster party. After squaring off with a mob boss (Zlatko Buric), she is ordered executed by his goons, played by John Magaro and Matthew Maher. Before they can pull the trigger, Ida falls down a metal staircase, breaking her neck and leg in a grisly tumble.

Enter Christian Bale’s Frankenstein monster, who now goes by Frank. He walks into the office of Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) seeking companionship in his lonely, misbegotten existence. These early scenes are among the film’s strongest. Bale channels a tragic, hulking vulnerability, and his fascination with the local picture houses provides one of the film’s more intriguing threads. He idolizes a movie star named Ronnie Reed, played by Jake Gyllenhaal with a breezy Gene Kelly swagger.

Through Frank, the film briefly finds something poignant: a meditation on loneliness filtered through the perspective of a monster. Bale’s look, heavily inspired by Boris Karloff’s original design, only deepens that connection to cinematic history.

That fragile emotional thread is jolted to life when Buckley’s Bride is resurrected to serve as Frank’s companion. Her creation sequence is electric. Buckley arrives with the iconic streaked hair and lightning-scarred makeup, vomiting black sludge while examining her blackened tongue in stunned horror. It’s grotesque, stylish, and thrilling. For a moment, the film reaches its gothic crescendo.

Unfortunately, it’s also where the wheels begin to come off.

Once the movie starts introducing additional plotlines, the narrative becomes hopelessly cluttered. A pair of gumshoe detectives played by Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz are tasked with tracking down Frank and the Bride as they wander the country. Their storyline never gains traction. They’re meant to evoke a pulpy noir energy, but they mostly drift in and out of the film without purpose.

Meanwhile, those mob goons from the opening reappear, now hunting the resurrected Ida despite the fact that she has no memory of her past life. Frank feeds her fragments of invented “memories,” which could have been fertile psychological territory, but the film barely explores the idea.

As if that weren’t enough, the movie introduces a broader social uprising as women across the country begin identifying with the Bride’s rebellion. The imagery evokes something like “V for Vendetta,” with headlines screaming things like “Twisted Sister Rages Against the Machine.” It’s a cheeky nod to the filmmakers’ influences, but it’s also another thematic thread that the film never meaningfully develops.

Gyllenhaal’s love of cinema was front and center in her previous film, 2021’s intimate and thoughtful “The Lost Daughter.” That movie thrived on its quiet moments and emotional precision. “The Bride!” occasionally tries to return to that mode, but the sheer scope of the story keeps pulling the film in too many directions at once.

By the time the movie barrels toward its bombastic finale, its original story of loneliness and longing has mutated into something far messier. What begins as a gothic tale of two outcasts searching for connection becomes an overcooked spectacle drowning in its own ideas.

Buckley, who was so extraordinary in “Hamnet” and remains a strong awards contender this year, never quite finds a consistent rhythm. Her performance is bold and committed, but it often feels dialed several notches too high. She swings for the fences in every scene, turning the Bride into a chaotic bundle of shrieks, swagger, and wild-eyed fury. It’s certainly memorable, but it also pushes the character into cartoonish territory.

Bale meets her intensity almost beat for beat, though his performance benefits from a steadier emotional core. When the film slows down long enough to let him simply exist within the character’s loneliness, he reminds you what this movie might have been.

“The Bride!” undeniably has cinematic pop. Lawrence Sher’s lush cinematography gives the film a grand, gothic sheen, and the practical makeup effects, especially Bale’s monster design, have a tactile craftsmanship that many modern blockbusters lack.

But style alone can’t rescue a movie that never decides what it wants to be. It’s too busy to fully embrace its campy absurdity, yet too airless to feel gritty or dangerous. “The Bride!” wants the best of both worlds, but ends up stranded somewhere awkwardly in between.

Grade: C- 

THE BRIDE is now playing in theaters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhgcUArO3Uo