Following Hamnet and "Wuthering Heights", Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! is the latest in a line of awful movies inspired by the work of great English writers. It's Mary Shelley here of course, but Gyllenhaal also plucks from James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein. Whale cast Elsa Lanchester in the dual roles of Shelley and the titular monster, and Gyllenhaal pulls the same trick here with Jessie Buckley. That's where the similarities end however, as The Bride! has more in common with '70s exploitation flicks and '90s horror comedies than either Shelley's novel or the Universal monster movies it inspired.
Surprisingly, the chief inspiration here appears to be Arthur Marks' 1976 blaxploitation classic JD's Revenge. In that movie a murdered 1930s mobster possesses a college student and uses their body to enact revenge against the gangsters responsible for his death (the premise has also been ripped off for the upcoming Japanese action comedy Ghost Killer). Here a 1930s Chicago gangster's moll (Buckley's Ida; presumably named after Lupino, as is another character here) is possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley and sets out for revenge against the criminals who tossed her down a flight of stairs.
Yes, you read that correctly. Shelley, represented as a disembodied head against a black background as though she were the narrator of an Ed Wood movie, has apparently spent centuries existing in a limbo state. Centuries, you say? Wait, didn't Shelley die in 1851? That's not even a full century before the 1930s! Look, you're going to have to put aside such questions, as this isn't a film that cares one jot about period accuracy. At one point a character bemoans the lack of "lady astronauts" (in the 1930s!); there's a visit to a cinema showing a Bela Lugosi movie in 3D (in the 1930s!); and a nightclub playing music closer to that you would have heard in Chicago's '80s House era than the Swing age.
This all might be explained away by considering Shelley has indeed been floating about in purgatory for centuries and is simply misremembering the 1930s; that none of this is actually happening in the world of the film but rather is simply a story being recounted by the dead author. But The Bride! is so terrible it's inconceivable that the author of one of the most revered literary works of all time could knock out something this bad.
The knuckle-headed plot sees Frankenstein's Monster (Christian Bale), who now goes by "Frank," visit Chicago's Dr Euphronious (Annette Bening), a scientist who has long studied the work of Baron Frankenstein. Bored of decades of celibacy, Frank desires a mate, and so Euphronious digs up Ida's corpse and brings her back from the dead with a few customary jolts of electricity.
That's as electric as The Bride! ever gets sadly, as the movie spends the rest of its patience testing run time floundering around in search of a narrative. The main plot is a mash-up of the great 1979 feminist gangster flick The Lady in Red (Buckley wears a similar red gown to the one sported by Pamela Sue Martin in that movie), the aforementioned JD's Revenge, Frankenhooker, Venom and Todd Haynes' Joker, with the resurrected Ida taking on mobsters, cops and any misbehaving men she comes across, inspiring a social movement of copycat feminists in the process. A subplot borrowed from John Landis's Innocent Blood sees a police detective (Peter Sarsgaard; I wonder how he landed the role?) smitten with Ida and accompanied by a slumming Penelope Cruz as his underappreciated secretary. Elsewhere time is devoted to Frank's infatuation with a movie star played by Jake Gyllenhaal (I wonder how he landed the role?).
On paper, The Bride! reads like a love letter to the goofy 1940s Universal Monster revival movies rather than their revered 1930s predecessors, but it's never as fun as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein et al, and it's almost an hour longer than each of those movies. It's convinced of its own wackiness, but despite its bonkers setup it's remarkably dull.
There is a palpable lack of spark between Buckley and Bale, making it impossible to invest in the budding romance between the undead lovers. Buckley is saddled with a confusing character, switching between a bad British accent as Shelley and an even worse Chicago drawl as Ida. Her performance is dialled up to 11, often rambling nonsensically like a cross between Shelley Winters and that old aristocratic dodder from the '90s British sketch comedy The Fast Show. Gyllenhaal imagines Shelley a potty-mouthed nutjob, but Ida is also a potty-mouthed nutjob, so it's difficult to tell where one character ends and the other begins (as bad as the Venom movies are, they at least make it easy to distinguish between Tom Hardy and the alien creature in his head). None of the cast members seem to be on the same wavelength regarding the film's tone, but in their defence the movie doesn't seem all that sure itself.
Aside from the idea of a great British writer possessing a flapper, there is nothing unexpected here. Frank and Ida dance to - I shit you not - 'Puttin' on the Ritz'. Gyllenhaal closes out her movie by playing Bobby Pickett's 'The Monster Mash' over the closing credits, which means 'On the Nature of Daylight' in Hamnet is somehow now only the second laziest use of an overplayed music cue in a Jessie Buckley movie from the last year. There are musical sequences, but they're so half-assed they suggest a fear of alienating the sort of boring cinemagoers who balk at dance numbers. The Bride! is somehow simultaneously over the top and undercooked, the movie Baz Luhrmann might make if he switched from coke to heroin. It is very much not alive.
The Bride! is available on Video On Demand now.
Directed by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening, Peter Sarsgaard, Julianne Hough, Jake Gyllenhaal
