Frankenstein’s unfortunate monster was put together out of offcuts and so is director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a furiously eclectic assemblage of body parts. Motivating breath, alas, is there none and so the film remains on the table, lifeless, a glorious mess of gorgeous odds and sods, twitching but refusing to draw breath.
To summarise the main thrust of the plot, after a century alone Frankenstein’s monster – Frank here – decides he needs a wife, and arrives at the office of Dr Euphronious, renowned for her re-animation research. After some niceties, Frank makes his pitch to Euphronious and she flat-out refuses to build him a bride, on ethical grounds. He responds with what he thinks is the killer argument – “I thought you were a mad scientist,” at which Dr Euphronious emits a cackle, just like a mad scientist.
The film momentarily swings, revelling for a moment in its comedic savvy. But Gyllenhaal is already off-course, having started losing her way early on, beginning her film three different times – first with Mary Shelley (voiced by Jessie Buckley) bemoaning her fate in the afterlife. Then with wild, epigram-spouting Ida (Buckley again) out with her fancy friends in cocktail-swigging 1930s New York. Then again with Frank at Dr Euphronious’s surgery, for the aforementioned request and cackle.
It’s meant to be a jumble of stuff. Mary Shelley speaking from the realm of the immortal, Christian Bale’s Frank dancing to Putting on the Ritz – the Young Frankenstein box ticked – the Bride’s hair and make-up somewhere between Elsa Lanchester’s in Bride of Frankenstein and Brigitte Helm’s in Metropolis. Frank and his bride at a nightclub that’s a mix of Weimar and the modern clubbing experience. Later, the pair of them on the run, in You Only Live Once style.
It gets tiring, enervating, all this meta this and meta that when a bit of straightforward storytelling might have eased it out of various tight spots as it works its variations-on-a-theme schtick to the bone.
Jessie Buckley is just as good here as she was in her Oscar-winning Hamnet turn, sensing, perhaps, that something needs to be pulled out of the bag to make the whole thing go. But so many great actors go underused. The excellent Christian Bale, getting the tone of comic desperatoin just right. Annette Bening as Dr Euphronious, Jake Gyllenhaal as a Fred Astaire-alike 1930s movie star, Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz as cops chasing after Frank and his bride after they accidentally kill a cop – he does the flirting, she does the police work in an obvious bit of feminist reclamation. John Magaro as a crime boss’s henchman. Jeannie Berlin as Dr Euphronious’s maid, and probably the funniest thing in it, an Igor to Dr Euphronious’s Baron F.
If you know who Myrna Loy and Ida Lupino were, or Dorothy Parker and Bonnie and Clyde, Maggie G’s references to them will give you a little frisson, maybe. If the work of Fritz Lang and James Whale is something you relish, there is also something for you here. But for the average punter who just wants a good story well told, the pickings are thin.
The frustrating thing is it’s halfway towards glory, and with all those 1930s references and so many characterful 1930s faces bulking out the backgrounds, a really good pastiche seems to have been the idea, but it somehow got lost in the attempt to get it onto the screen.
By the end, as Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers belt out the 1962 novelty hit The Monster Mash, it’s as if Maggie G is saying hasn’t it all been a bit of a lark? But it hasn’t. So earnest, so show-offy, so heavy-handed. Such furiously good acting though, which just makes it kind of worse.
The Bride! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
