The Bride!: Here She Comes, Like It or Not (I Do)
By Thom Ernst
Rating: A-
There’s a moment, somewhere around the point when a monster contemplates romance while a Gene Kelly–style musical number threatens to break out, that you realize restraint was never invited to the party in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!
After the intimate, scalpel-sharp control of her debut film, The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal returns with something that feels less like a second feature and more like a cinematic jailbreak. The budget is bigger, the canvas wider, and the stylistic ambitions — plural, emphatically plural — spill across the screen like a trunk of old Hollywood costumes dumped on the floor and worn all at once.
There is so much happening in The Bride! that the film seems to veer off its tracks. But Gyllenhaal has created a world that feels like it has landed inside the fevered dream of someone in detox, so veering into strange, unusual corners feels right. This is not a movie that believes in straight lines. It zigzags. It pirouettes. Occasionally, it wanders off to admire the scenery and returns a few minutes later humming a show tune.
The film is a hodgepodge of ideas — a quilted mesh of genres, themes, and wild sidebars stitched together from cinematic scraps that might have been left lying around by David Lynch, Arthur Hiller and Busby Berkeley. It’s gothic horror that suddenly remembers it wants to be a musical. It’s a love story that occasionally behaves like a manifesto. At times, it looks like a midnight movie that accidentally wandered onto a studio backlot.
Hovering over the entire enterprise is the ghost of James Whale, whose Bride of Frankenstein understood something essential about monsters: that they’re often the most human characters in the room. Whale’s films balanced horror with wit, tragedy with camp.
Gyllenhaal doesn’t replicate that tone so much as embrace its mischief. Her monsters sing, philosophize, and occasionally stage a small revolution. However, they still want what Whale’s monsters wanted —companionship, dignity, and someone who doesn’t scream when they walk into a room.
At times, the film also does a great deal of posturing. Themes of sexual violence, political cover-ups and the cultural reverberations of the #MeToo movement are not exactly hidden behind the veil. When Jessie Buckley’s Bride suddenly shouts “Me Too! Me Too!” the line lands less like subtext and more like someone has turned on the house lights and asked, “Did everyone catch that?”
Buckley attacks the role with wonderfully schizoid energy — the rapid-fire nonsensical momentum of someone whose personality seems to have been assembled from spare parts. She’s funny, frightening, unpredictable and oddly touching. It’s the sort of performance that seems constantly on the verge of tipping over, which is perfect for a film that appears to have built its aesthetic around the idea of tipping over.
Across from her is Christian Bale as Frankenstein’s creature — now going by his creator’s name — a patchwork being whose life experience is a long nightmare of loneliness and misread social cues. Bale plays the monster with surprising gentleness.
His reflexes can be violent when startled, but his instincts are soft. His greatest comfort comes from watching his favourite actor, a Gene Kelly–like musical dancer played by Jake Gyllenhaal, glide across a movie screen. If cinema has ever functioned as emotional therapy, this may be the most literal example.
The supporting cast clearly understands that subtlety is not the operating system here.
Annette Bening appears as Dr. Euphronius with the kind of theatrical relish that suggests she knows exactly what her role requires. Her mad scientist feels less like a laboratory rat and more like someone who might pause mid-experiment to deliver a speech about destiny while lightning flashes with obligatory emphasis over her head.
Penélope Cruz glides through the film with the kind of unpredictable magnetism she has made a career out of. She is the detective whose partner (Peter Sarsgaard) undermines her authority by introducing her as his secretary. Not that he doesn’t have great respect for her, he thinks it’s funny.
Cruz has always possessed the kind of screen presence where you’re never entirely certain if her character is about to kiss you or stab you — and the smart money is usually on both eventually happening.
Sarsgaard, Gyllenhaal’s real-life partner, brings his trademark slow-burn unease to the proceedings, playing a detective whose calm surface always seems to conceal complicated internal weather. In a film that occasionally threatens to spin into pure theatrical delirium, Sarsgaard supplies a grounding presence, or at least the closest thing this movie has to one.
There is no question that Gyllenhaal packs her film with so many ideas that it can become dizzying. The themes sometimes pile up, the tonal shifts arrive quickly, and the story occasionally feels less like it’s unfolding than tangling itself into elaborate knots. Some viewers will likely bail when the plot begins tripping over its own ambitions.
But the film also has an undeniable boldness. A willingness to be strange. To be excessive. To be gloriously weird.
And beneath all the camp, the musical flourishes and the ideological speeches, there is a story here. As Mary Shelley — also played by Buckley — explains while narrating from a shadowy black-and-white purgatory, The Bride! is ultimately a love story.
Not the tidy kind.
More the counter-culture variety that propelled films like Bonnie and Clyde, True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Badlands and even Sid and Nancy, movies where love doesn’t simply survive chaos but seems to require it.
Which may explain why The Bride! works best when it stops trying to behave itself.
This is a movie that loves cinema. Loves the 1920s. Loves spectacle. Loves being weird.
And for viewers willing to throw themselves into that chaos, the experience can feel less like watching a film and more like wandering through someone else’s delirious movie dream stitched from equal parts horror, romance, camp and reckless imagination.
Even if, like its monster, it occasionally looks as though it’s been assembled from spare parts.
The Bride! Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz and Peter Sarsgaard. In theatres March 6.