Reviews

Jessie Buckley is most likely going to be a Best Actress Oscar winner later this month, if her clean sweep this awards season is any indication.

But just before she (probably) strikes gold with Hamnet, she is already back with her next feature, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!

Inspired by 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, in which the titular character only appears briefly at the end, Gyllenhaal’s Gothic romance crime film imagines what happens after the Bride is brought back from the dead.

Set in 1930s Chicago, Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) goes to Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening) and asks her to make him a companion because he’s desperately lonely.

They dig up the body of a murdered woman named Ida and bring her back to life.

Together, Frankenstein, aka Frank, and the Bride unwittingly embark on a violent crime spree, followed by detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz).

In addition to the Bride, Buckley also plays Ida and Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. Three characters are too much, and she could have easily done without being Shelley too.

In fact, Shelley’s scenes are the worst in the film and it would have been a better experience without them.

She appears onscreen in black and white flashes and seems to incite Ida and the Bride’s bad behaviour and egg them on to act on their rage.

These scenes are weird and jarring, but thankfully, they appear less frequently in the second half.

Shelley also manifests herself as a voice inside Ida/the Bride’s head and seems to take them over, with Buckley frequently bursting into Shelley’s common British accent while dressed as her American characters.

It’s bizarre and it doesn’t work, and the film would have been significantly better if Buckley only played the Bride and the woman she was before.

Buckley and Bale’s performances are big, loud and over-the-top. Some people may consider this bad acting, but that’s what their characters required. You can’t expect realistic performances from monsters!

Elsewhere in the cast, Cruz is brilliant as a savvy assistant who deserves to be a detective – but she isn’t because she’s a woman – and Jake Gyllenhaal is a delight as Frank’s movie idol, Ronnie Reed, and needed more screen time.

You would expect a film following a Bonnie & Clyde-style crime spree to be exciting, entertaining and propulsive, but the film is messy, chaotic, narratively empty, and it’s not clear exactly what it’s trying to say.

But it is always gorgeous to look at, thanks to Sandy Powell’s costumes, Karen Murphy’s impressive 1930s production design and Lawrence Sher’s cinematography.

The Bride! is stunning and the performances are amusing, but it is narratively muddled and strangely unexciting.

In cinemas from Friday 6th March

By Hannah Wales

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