After a tragic and bizarre incident, Ida (Jessie Buckley), or whatever her name is to be, is resurrected from the dead to become the bride of Frankenstein’s Monster, Frank (Christian Bale), who requires companionship after 100 years roaming the world alone. The Bride has inconsistent memories of her time prior, and as Frank works to woo her, the pair’s relationship gets them into trouble, souring the great highs and lows of a makeshift matrimony.
Hey, I just watched Blue Moon where it was suggested that it was garish to add an exclamation point to your title, and that comment hasn’t missed The Bride! As soon as this movie begins it makes it clear that this is going to be one of those dicey revised historical jaunts, and the opening is deplorable; grotesque behaviour from random people around a dinner table and I have no idea what Ida is babbling about. We have one of those scenarios where Jessie Buckley will win the Oscar this week (beautifully, for Hamnet) and follow that up with a wince-inducing watch in her proceeding role. Remarkable. And I can’t blame Jessie Buckley – she is giving it her full rev without the handbrake on, and it’s up to the director to hone her in or better shape the character. What is it that this movie wants to be? I’ve seen plots meander around before – See How They Run, Burn After Reading – but they at least aim to be fun. A horror comedy should be fun, not audibly groan-inducing… and in fact, I counted six 🤓 And going into this movie, I thought, surely there’s a story here, whereby the Bride has always only ever been brought to life to be Frankenstein’s sex object, or dutiful partner, and feminism in any form can object to that. What does she want for herself? Can she find her own desires and purpose independently? I suppose you could argue that Poor Things did this recently, if you’re content with the only conclusion being sexual gratification as your sole ambition 😑 I like the Bride’s black facial markings. I like the idea that the Bride has Tourette’s, even if the movie’s execution is a bit unintentionally funny and exhausting. But why the hell is she talking to Mary Shelley? Have her brain be damaged, or a composition of multiple women before reanimation. Or have her spirit’s essence having intertwined around others on the path to the afterlife where now their remnants still come through – there’s three work arounds to achieve this same affect, and better. She could literally be the ideation of “I’m every woman”, and Frank could say that he used to converse with other voices too, but they fade away after a while. And again, why the hell is she talking to Mary Shelley? How the hell is she talking to Mary Shelley? For this to work, Mary Shelley must be prominent because she wrote Frankenstein, but also Frankenstein exists in this fictional world, so nobody wrote Frankenstein 😵💫 Oh – this movie is trying to have that “Barbie, come to Jesus” moment that had Barbie talk to her own creator, isn’t it? I’ve just realised. Well, it doesn’t work at all! Did Mary Shelley even have a hand in creating the Bride of Frankenstein? I thought that was Universal Pictures… Yeah, this movie is stitched together worse than Frank’s forehead (boom-boom!).
And I’m not letting Christian Bale’s monster off the hook either. Write it that Frankenstein only just discovered the pictures and is enthralled by them, since society has become too compact and lit up to observe like he used to. But the cinema, a darkened room, allows him to get up close and personal to humanity’s intricacies and it is revolutionary. The problem with Frank is that we just had Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein which did properly focus on the Monster’s inquisitive zest for knowledge, and this movie does next to nothing. Here, Frank is a blank slate – he’s a big pussycat doting on the Bride; occasionally, he gets angry, and he’s as withdrawn as Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. I don’t, for the life of me, realise why Frank left it so late to tell the Bride how she came to be or how she never clued in by looking at him – I suppose just to keep that narrative tension alive, and men do be selfish rats. Again, you could have it that Frank and Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Benning) do tell Ida that she’s been reanimated but she freaks out; and because her memory is so sketchy, she forgets, and they daren’t risk telling her again – my way, the tension stays, and our heroes aren’t assholes. Novel idea, ey? I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how Frank got into the back of the car after being shot in the head either, but I’ll put that down to me blinking, or shotty editing. Also, how did the authorities find the frisky pair at the drive-in when Detective Malloy (Penélope Cruz) was the only one who knew about the cinema connection? 🤷♀️
The many times I groaned: the angry mob leaving the 3D movie theatre literally have a lit torch in 1930s New York. Did one of those horny teenagers bring it from home? The tubby cop that gets shot by the Bride at the dinner party steps forward to stop the Bride monologuing, AFTER she’s been going for about 2 minutes, and five other policeman with guns drawn has assessed it as a stand-off – I cannot express how funny this moment is; it’s like the cop had just had enough of the Bride’s bullshit and stopping it was worth dying for, or he had an omnipotent level of belief in himself to defuse the situation. Absolutely terrible happenstance purely designed to move the plot forward. Then, this movie is not happy going more than five minutes without somebody rapin’ – no exaggeration, I recall four instances of sexual assault in this movie, and that’s excluding whatever is happening at the dinner table with the oysters. The Bride and Frank go from the nightclub to the alleyway and leave one sexual assault for another, but what pissed me off the most is that the movie feels the need to show the barbaric curb stomp conducted by Frank, when it quite easily could have inferred that, showing Frank from the waste up. And just the whole idea of Frank dancing to express his softer side is awful, making me recall Joker and Joker: Folie a Deux, and you’d think a Warner Bros. production would want to steer clear of anything from those movies after Todd Phillips nuked the studio. Of course, Detective Wiles (Peter Sarsguard) didn’t do his darndest to help Ida prevent the mob’s murders after he slept with her, because even though he’s the good cop, he’s still a man, and men can’t get anything right. It’s not endearing, it’s not subtle, it doesn’t stick-it-to-the-man; it’s just tiresome.
You know the one scene that I thought was pretty good? The mob scene where the mob boss orders his underlings to get Ida since she’s clearly not dead. It’s generic, a totally nothing-special scene, and it comes two thirds into the movie, but I thought “finally, there’s some momentum moving forward”; some stakes, as to now we’ll have an antagonist out to cause some danger – even if those mobsters were a little Jungle 2 Jungle, a little 101 Dalmatians (derivatives of Home Alone) 🙃 But the movie doesn’t even resolve the mobster element within the actual narrative, tacking it on through the credits. The whole idea of the Bride inspiring a violent feminist uprising is insipid and unearned too. At one stage the maid, Greta (Jeannie Berlin), brings Euphronious a newspaper showing the Bride’s uprising and she tut-tuts, even though Greta already has the face paint on and is decidedly on board with it. But truly, the heavy-handed feminist corrosions are just one of about five intentions gone wrong in this movie, like vibrant colours added to a pot of paint that’s swirled together to make a sewerage poo. These idiot directors need to realise that when they make such violent absorbent depictions of social inequality, they really only expose their own personal unprocessed frustrations as a result. The Bride searches for her true name for the entire movie, and I’d love for director Maggie Gyllenhaal to personally explain to me how “The Bride” is in any way a cathartic resolution. It still a reference to a role in service to a man, for mine – but Mary Shelley reacts like the Bride just struck oil.
The Bride! boasts the type of anti-plotline that makes you forget that plotlines can be good. I thought the only one who was going to come out of this production unscathed would be the enduring Annette Benning, like the sole survivor sitting atop the only visible part of an overturned ship; but then the movie gives her extra poppycock, about her late husband and the… “irregular triangulation”? …whatever that means. Like everything, there is a good story in here somewhere, but the movie rushes so fast past it and I wonder if it ever even made sense on the page. Somehow, I doubt it. The Bride! is one of the worst experiences(!) I’ve ever had in a cinema(!), dragging down a slew of prominent actors, one of which is definitely doing his sister a favour 😅 What happened? The Lost Daughter was such a gentle, subtle, exploration into an idea, and I’m in all support of undertaking the challenge of doing the exact opposite for your next project, but this movie is ugly, reckless, unwieldy, and amateur. It’s pathetic, really. I’m not surprised to hear internet chatter that some people walked out mid-screening – they honestly valued their time wiser than I.
0.5
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