Nate At The Movies

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

I’ve had a pretty big Franken-week, having watched the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein earlier in the week in preparation for The Bride! today. I was left a bit disappointed by the titular Bride’s absence in her film debut, so I was actually kind of hopeful for this movie. I knew I’d at least see her on the screen a lot more, and she was being played by soon-to-have-her-first-Oscar Jessie Buckley. Expectations weren’t sky-high, but I was excited, and unfortunately, that excitement slowly wore off.

Let’s start with the good. The two leading performances from the aforementioned Buckley and Christian Bale were strong, and their dynamic that I so sorely missed from the original Bride of Frankenstein was nice to see, even if it only availed itself in this film’s second half. The Bride took a minute to get used to the Monster, but once they found their groove à la Bonnie and Clyde, I was satisfied. The movie was also routinely quite nice to look it, gothic and neon and well-lit, and the Bride and the Monster fit inside of it quite nicely.

Where the film lost its way, unfortunately, was in a pretty crucial category: the story. In a cruel twist of fate, the film felt like a Frankensteined-together version of better films riffing on the same material. It felt like The Bride! wanted to be Poor Things, Joker: Folie à Deux, and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein all at the same time, and it failed to be any of them. The story was quite incoherent, introducing interesting ideas just as quickly as they were discarding them without any development. Tell me more about the “Brain Attack” movement! Dive into the mad scientist’s past! Give me another dance number! Anytime Gyllenhaal introduced something new, she got rid of it and returned to her comparatively dull pair of detectives. I didn’t buy a ticket to The Detectives!

Even with a couple strong moments in the narrative—the ballroom scene (and Jessie Buckley waving around a gun) stood out—The Bride! wasn’t able to stitch together all of its ambitious ideas into a cohesive, entertaining film. At the end of the day, it’s nice to see ambition favored over security in storytelling, even when it misses, so I’d take another huge swing and miss like The Bride! over another legacy sequel or soulless remake. I do think, though, we can close the door on the Frankenstein riffs. Poor Things took that cake a few years ago, and with del Toro making the best true adaptation I’ve seen last year, The Bride! felt, among other things, recycled. We can totally keep giving Jessie Buckley blank checks, though. That is so working.