The Bride! Messy But Great!

The Bride! Movie Review

From imdb.com

“The Bride!” directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is one of the most interesting renditions of the old story. In fact, there are very few threads from that old work left here. Imagine a story from the Bride’s perspective married to a ghost story about Mary Shelley herself. This seems like a lot. Unfortunately, it really is.

Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale are Ida and Frank in a wild monster version of Bonnie and Clyde, wrapped in a tale that deals with mental illness, women’s rights, and the tropes of the original Frankenstein work itself. There are plenty of fun highlights here, but the whole movie is hard to sell to any one particular audience.

If you’re here for the horror, you are sure to be disappointed. The body horror might be more significant than any traditional monster movie horror. There are certainly some interesting dramatic scenes where bullets and punches fly, but “The Bride!” would be hard to call an action movie. Perhaps drama is the better place to fit this round peg, but the problem is that there are wide swaths, especially toward the end, of dark comedy. As modern dark comedy often does, it interferes with the drama of nearly every scene.

As a movie, “The Bride!” is often a big mess. I will say that the story is coherent and quite easy to follow. Even for a modern audience, the through line is evident and easy to read. That might be a failing as well, given that most movies I’ve enjoyed over the past five years have been criticized for having convoluted storylines.

“The Bride!” is drenched in period style, and its set pieces and scenes are alive with this old-fashioned energy. If the movie does anything well, it’s setting a scene. But I would say that most audiences would criticize this too, as the movie seems to suffer at every turn from its time period. Even if one of its major themes is pointing out the gender shift slowly happening during the time of the movie.

I have to admit the movie’s assumption that every man the Bride meets is actually a rapist, aside from Frankenstein, is a bit of a strange take. I’ve seen this kind of black-and-white thinking in other horror movies, but as this one is desperately trying to say something about actual reality, it’s quite off-putting. If this is simply a symptom of having a completely unreliable narrator, or something else, I think it somewhat damages the believability of the story.

In the end, I actually loved “The Bride!” More for all the things it was trying to do than for what it actually got right. In fact, as a retelling of any of Mary Shelley’s work, it does a terrible job. I found the Netflix retelling far better at the end of the day. But this movie was more art piece than reliable retelling, and that is the best way of looking at it.