When Monster Movies Try to Do Everything at Once

Monster movies arrive in peculiar waves. Vampires dominated screens throughout the 2010s, following the gritty zombie hordes of the decade before. Now we're swimming in Frankensteins, each adding stylized flavor to Mary Shelley's creation: Zelda Williams's goofy high-school version Lisa Frankenstein, Yorgos Lanthimos's steampunk Poor Things, and Guillermo Del Toro's faithful adaptation currently competing for nine Oscars. Each used Shelley's tale to generate sympathy for the creature—a relatable innocent navigating a world they never asked to inhabit.

Enter Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!, a proudly discordant spin on Bride of Frankenstein that could have delivered a provocatively modern interpretation by centering its female lead. Instead, Gyllenhaal's attempt at meaningful commentary drowns in the film's overwhelming cacophony of competing elements.

The Kitchen Sink Approach

The Bride! offers something for everyone—and therein lies its problem. Craving Fred Astaire musicals? Check. Throwback gangster pictures? Absolutely. Girl-power revolution or watching a scar-ridden colossus curb-stomp goons? All present, provided you can stomach frequent meta-textual references and buckets of gore.

This ambitious scope reflects recent Warner Bros. passion projects like Sinners and Wuthering Heights—films that let visionary directors work on grand scales, Hollywood timidity be damned. But where those films managed to weave social commentary seamlessly with entertainment, The Bride! shows how filmmakers can lose themselves in their venture's sheer size, remembering to include big ideas only as afterthoughts.

The film follows Gyllenhaal's breakthrough directorial effort The Lost Daughter, a languid, unsettling thriller focused on emotional breakdown during a Mediterranean vacation. That film's subtlety made Gyllenhaal's tackle of Bride of Frankenstein—remade nearly as often as its predecessor—seem promising. Instead, her creation becomes an amalgam of disparate concepts assembled in defiance of storytelling logic.

From Oysters to Resurrection

Jessie Buckley stars as Ida, a gangster's moll in 1930s Chicago. The film opens with Ida eating an oyster so slimy it triggers violent possession by Mary Shelley herself. Soon murdered by her criminal associates, Ida finds new life when Frankenstein's monster (Christian Bale) and a mad scientist (Annette Bening) resurrect her corpse through electrical shock.

The plot complexity only escalates from there. Every time viewers might question the story's logic, another distracting development or act of violence demands attention. How does Shelley exist alongside her fictional creation? The Bride's response: Don't worry about it!

Once revived, Buckley delivers a performance rife with tics and guttural asides, switching between rat-a-tat mobster slang and Shelley's flowery English prose like some postmodern literary Gollum. Bale, impressive under heavy makeup, brings mournful sweetness to "Frank" while remaining prone to rage when threatened. Together, this grimy pair rides rails across America, watching movies starring Frank's favorite actor Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal) while somehow sparking a feminist uprising against the gangsters who originally killed Ida.

Too Many Moving Parts

These events connect only through their happening to Frank and Ida. Gyllenhaal simply cannot settle on a tone, and while maximalist mash-ups have succeeded under confident directors like Baz Luhrmann, too many choices here feel random for randomness's sake. The aforementioned uprising occurs during a dance sequence inspiring young women to imitate Ida down to her peculiar face tattoos.

Then there's the subplot of Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his plucky assistant Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz)—a bickering duo chasing Frankenstein and his bride. Yes, this script believed a big-budget gangster-monster epic could accommodate screwball buddy comedy too.

Gyllenhaal deserves applause for swinging big. At its best, such genre splicing could deliver a fun, flirty rebuke to "elevated horror," prioritizing enjoyment over arty prestige. But The Bride! repeatedly lurches toward serious, almost hectoring modes, ensuring audiences understand that Ida's tortured love story doubles as patriarchal liberation narrative.