Director Maggie Gyllenhaal seeks to give us a fresh take on The Bride of Frankenstein through a stylish, feminist lens in The Bride!. The film is a commendable swing, but too often collapses under its own ambition.

We begin with a framing device that sees Jessie Buckley as Mary Shelley in a stark black-and-white afterlife. She tells us that her Frankenstein story is not actually complete, that she has much more to say, but this time it will be wild, raw, and female-empowering. “Here comes the motherfucking bride!” she warns.

Cut to Buckley as Ida, a party girl in 1936 Chicago who’s getting wild and making a scene at a restaurant with some sleezy mob enforcers. One man force feeds her an oyster (get it!) and it’s clear that she and the other ladies in the group are probably not here entirely of their own free will. She’s briefly possessed by Shelley’s spirit before she’s pushed down the stairs in a sequence that Madeline Ashton would call brutal. 

We next meet Christian Bale as Frankenstein’s monster, who goes by Frank. He seeks out Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), a calm but collected mad scientist who is the world’s leading expert in “reinvigoration”. Frank emplores her to create him a companion, echoing a few of the “male loneliness epidemic” talking points we hear spouted around the internet, but with more softness than your average social media incel. 

We know just the corpse to revive, and after a few sparks and levers, Ida is back, but unable to recall anything about her past. This gives Frank a great chance to gaslight her into believing they were in love, which she quickly accepts.

But two reanimated corpses running amok will inevitably invite trouble. An incident at a nightclub leads to some goons trying to sexually assault The Bride, causing Frank to murder them, which throws us into a Bonnie and Clyde outlaw romance and brings in two detectives (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz) to track down our monsters.

The Bride! is absolutely stuffed with ideas, references, and style. From the Mary Shelley framing device (which randomly comes and goes) to the detective B-plot (which randomly comes and goes) to Frank’s obsession with a movie star played by Jake Gyllenhaal (which randomly comes and goes) to The Bride inspiring a female revolution a la Joker (which also randomly comes and goes), there are way too many storylines and themes competing for our attention, and none feel very fleshed out. 

The experience is similar to bingeing a streaming series, but only watching odd-numbered episodes. I bet they did more with this storyline in that episode I missed. Lots of things are set up, but so few are ever paid off.

On top of feeling disjointed and overstuffed, we also get the most basic and clunky Feminism 101 themes that don’t really seem to go anywhere beyond “look at this woman who was done wrong by shitty men and she’s angry.” And why is making your character the constant victim of sexual assault the only way to show a Strong Woman™ in film? It’s honestly wild for a movie that tries so hard to be female-empowering to basically give us a heroine who feels like a manic pixie dream corpse half the time, despite the incredible skills of Buckley. 

The primary redeeming qualities of The Bride! were the visuals from cinematographer Lawrence Sher and the score from Hildur Guðnadóttir, who both worked on the similarly stylish but abysmal Joker: Folie à Deux. The flair in these elements could create a kind of cult movie vibe that might give The Bride! life after the initial release.

Similarly, there are a few references and nods that feel fun instead of frantic. Several quick cutaways to Jake Gyllenhaal’s black and white movies are genuinely funny, and a nod to the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” scene in Young Frankenstein got a smile out of me, but it faded as soon as we whipped to another half-baked storyline.

I’m a person who loves a big swing, and I applaud Gyllenhaal for going wild with it in The Bride! but this reinvigorated monster of stitched together ideas and themes would probably be best left in the grave.