Resurrection

Film: The Bride!
Format: Streaming video from HBO on Fire!

There are a couple of things I say pretty regularly here to the point where I’m not sure if I should keep saying them. One of them is that I genuinely want to like every movie that I watch, even when I suspect it’s not going to be good. With The Bride!, with or without the punctuation, there was added incentive to like the film. Any time a movie gets negative reactions because of the theme, the cast, or the director (see the recent controversy around The Odyssey), I go into it predisposed with the opinion that the attacks on it are probably nonsense. The Bride! got a lot of negative reactions, not a few of which regarded Maggie Gyllenhaal at the helm.

The reality, at least as I see it, is that this is a movie that isn’t sure what it wanted to be. It’s clearly a romance and there are clearly horror elements in it. Is it a feminist manifesto? A fever dream? A story of possession? An undead remake of Bonnie and Clyde? The problem is that it’s kind of all of these things, and because of that, it’s also kind of none of them.

The Bride! is a retelling of The Bride of Frankenstein writ large and without restraint. We are going to be assaulted by this movie by intent. We start, not with Dr. Frankenstein, but with Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), who speaks to us from the afterlife. She tells us that she wanted to tell another story, but died before she could. To tell the story, she possesses Ida (also Jessie Buckley), a woman living in Chicago during the Great Depression. Shelley possesses Ida, who suddenly starts speaking in a British accent, and begins calling out Lupino (Zlatko Burić), a crime boss. Two of Lupino’s men corner Ida, who falls down a staircase, breaking her neck.

Around the same time, also in Chicago, Frankenstein’s monster, going by Frank (Christian Bale) locates Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Benning). Her work has been in the field of reanimation. Frank, having experienced more than a full century of loneliness, begs her to reanimate a corpse (guess whose!) for him, a task she undertakes out of scientific curiosity. Ida is revived, but without any memory; Frank tells her they are married and lost her memory in an accident.

What follows is a crime spree that starts when Frank kills two men who decide to assault Ida, who has been named Penelope by Frank. Because they look the way they do, they are incredibly easy to spot, and everywhere they go attracts police. Soon enough, Ida/Penelope and Frank are crossing the country on a robbery and murder spree. Through all of this, Ida/Penelope rechristens herself as “The Bride” and also continues to have bouts of Mary Shelley possessing her, causing her to shout very loudly and attract a lot of attention.

I really wanted to like this. I genuinely did. I like Maggie Gyllenhaal, and I like the fact that she frequently is willing to make films that are transgressive in one way or another, although arguably she does that much more as an actor than as a director. The issue with The Bride! is that it’s trying to be everything at once. It’s filled with ideas and with things it wants us to see. We’re going to get every reference Gyllenhaal could think of on the screen. Freedom is great, but this is a film made without restraint, and it feels like a film made without oversight because of it.

There are simply too many ideas here. Mary Shelley didn’t need to be a part of this. We don’t really need Frank’s obsession with a Fred Astaire-style actor, or at least we don’t need this to take up as much space as it does. Gyllenhaal is directing this like she is never going to direct another film, so she needs to get all of her ideas on screen at once.

Maggie Gyllenhaal has good ideas. She could become a good or even a great director over time. She has a lot to say, and while there are a lot of aspects of this film that I don’t like, I like her ambition and I like her guts. I like most of the cast of this, and there’s a great deal here that is really worth liking.

I just wish that all of that had been put in support of something better.

Why to watch The Bride!: It’s not afraid to be experimental.
Why not to watch: So much ambition that it doesn’t fulfill any of it.