Actress-turned-director Maggie Gyllenhaal has reimagined Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel “Frankenstein” as a new film with the Bride as the central character. So it’s fitting that "The Bride!" hits theaters during Women’s History Month.
Shelley did not give her Frankenstein monster a bride. In the novel, the Creature requests one to ease his loneliness, and Victor begins to create her but, just before bringing her to life, he destroys her. He fears she might become evil, reject the Creature, or produce monstrous offspring.
But Hollywood did bring the Bride to life. James Whale’s “Frankenstein” adaptation in 1931 was so popular that Universal urged him to make a sequel, which he eventually did in 1935 with “Bride of Frankenstein.” With no lines and only minutes of screen time, Elsa Lanchester managed to create one of cinema's most iconic characters as the Bride.
Gyllenhaal had never seen the Universal monster classic but was inspired to revisit the story after seeing a tattoo of Lanchester’s Bride on a man’s arm. Only then did she watch the 1935 film. Gyllenhaal did not approach this project out of a love for the original or Shelley’s novel. Instead, she saw the iconic Bride as a mute character and urgently wanted to give her a voice … along with a feminist agenda.
The story Gyllenhaal creates for her Bride opens with author Shelley (played by Jessie Buckley) in hell, uttering “fuck” frequently, because Gyllenhaal seems to think that makes her modern and punky. Shelley then wills herself — or her character — into a woman named Ida (also Buckley) in 1930s Chicago (a parallel-universe 1930s Chicago that feels reimagined rather than real). Ida behaves as if possessed and out of control. She speaks as if she has Tourette's and can't control her verbal outbursts, which sometimes manifest with an English accent. Shelley seems to be trying to wake Ida from the hell she is in.
Ida's violent display and wild accusations toward the powerful men in the room lead to her being killed. But don’t worry, she won’t stay dead for long.
Meanwhile, Frankenstein (the monster and the doctor are merged into one here and played by Christian Bale) arrives at the home/office/lab of Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) to request that she make him a companion. She initially refuses on moral and ethical grounds, but he tempts her with the thrill of science and invention. So they dig up Ida’s body and reanimate her, but she has no memory — only a vague sense of unfinished business.
Det. Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz) are on their trail, as are hired killers who fear the resurrected Ida may try to sing like a canary again.
If Gyllenhaal wanted to create a Frankenstein monster of a movie stitched together from mismatched styles and genres, with reanimated parts from other films, then she succeeded. She’s like a mad scientist so excited by her act of creation that she can’t stop herself from adding more limbs than a single cinematic body can sustain. The result is a film that tries to suture one cohesive story including romance, gender bias, mad science, #MeToo, patriarchy, gangsters, musical, cult of personality, the allure of movie magic, corruption, misogyny, otherness and more. Each scene often feels like an entirely separate entity with no relation to the others.
There are times when Frankenstein (rechristened as just Frank) and the Bride are seen as so hideous that people run from them in terror, yet they can enter a sophisticated party without anyone noticing. At that party, Frank and the Bride even perform a massive musical number to "Putting on the Ritz" (a weirdly out-of-place homage to “Young Frankenstein”) in which the entire room joins in. I kept waiting for that “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” moment where the glorious dance we are watching turns out to be just in the characters’ heads and the painful reality of the scene is that they are making fools of themselves. But Gyllenhaal leaves the scene as another baffling reality.
The Bride’s past involving gangsters and politicians is glimpsed at the beginning and then gets resurrected at the end to reinforce the film's female revenge angle. Gyllenhaal sacrifices Shelley’s themes for a contrived feminist story in which women are silenced by literally having their tongues cut out by men. Then the Bride repeatedly screams at the audience, “me too, me too," in case we missed the message. Women even tattoo themselves with the black stain that the Bride has on her face as if in solidarity. In Gyllenhaal’s hands, it feels more like a fashion statement rather than political activism.
It recalled the Ellen Jamesians in John Irving’s novel “The World According to Garp.” In the novel, a woman named Ellen James is raped and has her tongue cut out by her attackers. That inspires a feminist movement in which women cut out their own tongues in solidarity and protest.
Shelley and The Bride do not feel like natural vessels for Gyllenhaal’s particular brand of feminism, so the script contorts and strains to make them fit the agenda. There are points at which I am unclear what that agenda is. The Bride repeatedly uses the line from Herman Melville’s Bartleby, “I would prefer not to.” But that line and that character are about passive resistance, while Gyllenhaal seems to want the Bride to have fierce agency, so it feels inconsistent and perplexing.
In the opening, Shelley suggests this might be a love story, and I wish Gyllenhaal had agreed. The romance between a lonely monster and a woman brought back from the dead with unresolved issues is where the story finds the most heart and soul. Gyllenhaal, who has a visual flair, gets the romance and the loneliness right but then gets distracted by multiple other threads. When Frank and the Bride go to the cinema, there is bittersweet beauty in their escape through the darkness of the theater and the luminous glow of the characters on screen.
Bale and especially Buckley are genuinely good in the roles and elicit our empathy, which is why I felt so annoyed that Gyllenhaal mocks them by using the Monster Mash novelty song as the button to wrap up their story. They deserve better.
For a "Frankenstein" story reimagined as either a feminist tale or love story, I’ll take “Poor Things” or even “Frankenhooker” over this any day — more fun and more effective.
Companion viewing
- Start with the best: James Whale's "Frankenstein" (1931) and "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), then enjoy Hammer Films' "The Curse of Frankenstein" (1957) and "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed" (1969).
- Follow up with the hilarious but also spot-on comedy of Mel Brooks' "Young Frankenstein" (1974) or the lighter weight "Frankenweenie" (2012) from Tim Burton. You could also add Burton's "Edward Scissorhands" (1990).
- For a feminist twist: "Frankenhooker" (1990) and "Poor Things" (2023).
- For a modern twist: "The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster" (2023).
- For pure insanity: "Flesh for Frankenstein" (1973) and "Rocky Horror Picture Show" (1975).
- Behind the scenes of the novel: "Gothic" (1986) and "A Nightmare Wakes" (2020). Behind the scenes of James Whale's films: "Gods and Monsters" (1998).
- For perhaps one of the most faithful adaptations: TV mini-eries "Frankenstein: The True Story" (1974) or the National Theatre's 2011 filmed play, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating as Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. Guillermo Del Toro's "Frankenstein" is beautiful but not very faithful.
