Review: Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride is a wild, unabashedly angry mashup of tones, styles, and influences

The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore feature film as a writer/director, is a wild, unabashedly angry mashup of tones and styles and influences. Jumping off of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Frankenstein, Gyllenhaal introduces “the bride”, a “reinvigorated” corpse given a second go-round at life, herself a confluence of characters and ideas and wants and motivations.

The Bride! is messy and imperfect and bold and distinct and stylish, just as “the bride” is messy and imperfect and bold and distinct and stylish. Following Emerald Fennell’s horned-up remix of Wuthering Heights, I have decided that I don’t care about fealty to text or literary bothers and druthers, not when the FILMS are this exciting and strange and outré and giddy with thought. I support women’s cinematic wrongs!

Jessie Buckley pulls triple duty, first as Mary Shelley, dead and trapped in some kind of nether-space, conscious of her passing but still gravid with ideas and stories and fury. Second, Buckley plays Ida, a 1930s moll who parties with gangsters but doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself. When Ida is killed, Mary Shelley breathes soul into her and thus is born “the bride”, a new creature, seething with life and passion and confusion and an anger that is hers, that is Ida’s, that is Mary’s, that encompasses generations of female trauma and rage.

The bride is brought to life by the wishes of “Frank”, presented as Mary Shelley’s own wretched creature, cursed with life and loneliness and now in his second miserable century of existence. Christian Bale is wonderful as Frank, who just wants a companion—here Gyllenhaal’s read of Frankenstein’s monster crosses paths with Guillermo Del Toro’s—and has tracked down a mad scientist, Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), to perform the “reinvigoration” of a lady corpse they dig up. Frank is sensitive and wistful, he loves movies—again crossing paths with Del Toro’s cinematic monsters—especially those of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), a Fred Astaire-type who recovered from polio and with the aid of special shoes can dance masterfully. Frank imagines himself in Hollywood musicals, dancing and delighting crowds, rather than being chased with torches and pitchforks.

But the bride, when she comes to, is not a creature of whimsy. She has Ida’s patchy memory of a Chicago mob boss, corrupt cops, and a string of dead girls; she vomits Mary’s verbose vocabulary, she asks Frank who she was before “the accident”, she builds an identity out of anger, fear, and joie de vivre. But she is also Tisiphone, raging through society and calling for the destruction of the patriarchy that cost Ida her life. She is a “brain attack” spreading through the young women of the world, she is not subtle, she is a wrecking ball knocking into every gate and fence meant to limit and diminish women.

Gyllenhaal throws a lot of spaghetti at the wall and Buckley matches her beat for beat, committed to this wild-eyed, frizzy-haired goddess of female wrath going scorched earth on everyone around her. Frank trails in her wake, equally committed to his companion, even as she brings hell down around them. There is palpable glee in the performances, so much so that even Christian Bale seems to be having fun. And there is palpable glee in Gyllenhaal’s choices as a director. The Bride! may be imperfect in narrative form and thematic function, stuffed with too many ideas to sort them all out in some kind of sensible manner, but stylistically Gyllenhaal is going for it, giving everything to every big idea, running hand-in-hand with Buckley’s bravura performance.

And sure, it doesn’t all work, and often The Bride! is eye-rollingly obvious, but there is something to be said for women taking big swings on the big screen, unrepentantly trying everything at once and not apologizing if it doesn’t quite land. Men get to make messy movies all the time and a cottage industry of Discourse doesn’t spring up around them. Gyllenhaal is just taking her piece of the messy movie pie and having a ball jamming her hands into the narrative ooze.

The Bride! is brash and fun and loud and crazy, no, it doesn’t all work, but who cares? It’s exciting! It’s thrilling to watch a filmmaker come into her own with style and boldness, and Jessie Buckley’s triple performance is masterful and bananas and cool. What is “good” in the face of such energy and effort and ideas? This film is an experience, it is A Happening, it is glass box of emotion and that emotion is female rage and rebellion. The Bride! is for messy bitches and drunk girls gassing you up in the bathroom, it’s for shes and theys and gentlethems, it’s for punks and goths and weirdos and nerds. Maggie Gyllenhaal made a film for freaks and Jessie Buckley devoted herself to embodying the bride, an archetypical freak. The Bride! is many things, but it is never boring.

The Bride! is now playing exclusively in theaters.