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.
