The last time Warner Bros. gambled on an auteur-driven horror film featuring vintage movie monsters, they hit the jackpot with Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners. Released nearly a year ago last April, that vampire yarn scored critical acclaim, major box office and a historic number of Oscar nominations. Now here comes The Bride!, a bold new take on the Frankenstein mythos from writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Christian Bale as the long-dead doctor’s creature and your next Best Actress winner, Jessie Buckley, as his better half.
Funnily enough, both Sinners and The Bride! also share a similar time period, as Gyllenhaal has brought Mary Shelley‘s creations into a ’30s-era Chicago. Come to think of it, Bale’s Frankenstein could even have shown up in the Windy City just after Michael B. Jordan‘s Smoke and Stack blew town, heading back to Mississippi for their close encounter with the bloodsucking kind. And just like Coogler’s deservedly praised “Surreal Montage,” The Bride! also makes room for a fever dream-like extended musical interlude that pays homage to everything from Fred Astaire movies to Young Frankenstein.
That’s the kind of wild pop culture pastiche that Gyllenhaal was stitched together out of the bones of Shelley’s novel, and your feelings about The Bride! will ultimately hinge on whether the movie’s chaotic energy thrills or exhausts you. The film has been dogged by rumors of reshoots and editing room tinkering, and that’s felt most acutely in the final act, where the various threads that the filmmaker is tugging on never quite weave together.
Prior to that, though, Gyllenhaal’s freewheeling approach makes The Bride! an amusing and invigorating departure from some of the more reverential takes on Frankenstein, up to and including Guillermo del Toro‘s Oscar-nominated version that’s streaming on Netflix now. Consider this a case where you’re either going to embrace the mess or look around for a mop for all the vomit and viscera that hits the floor during the course of the movie.
READ: The 10 best Frankenstein movies, ranked
Critics are both hugging and hating on The Bride! in almost equal measure. The film currently has a 49 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 57 percent rating on Metacritic.
The Wrap’s William Bibbiani leads off the positive takes, writing: “The Bride! isn’t so much an adaptation of Shelley’s novel as it is a glorious pastiche, combining elements of Frankenstein with gangster pictures, golden age musicals, gothic romance, silent cinema and comic books. It’s a monstrous Hollywood production with a fiery independent spirit. It’s hard not to love this messed up, messy movie.”
“Buckley anchors this thing, delivering a full and nuanced performance which also requires — nay, demands — that she run rampant,” Bibbiani continues, giving a special shout-out to the Hamnet star on the cusp of her Oscar win. “Buckley goes a big as she can go, often hitting the stratosphere, and her work is invigorating.”
Writing for the BBC, Caryn James is also wild for Jessie, even if performer and character don’t fully sync up right away. “Buckley gives a ferocious performance, but it takes a while to believe in the Bride’s character, not because she doesn’t know herself but because Gyllenhaal’s stylistic shifts keep us at a distance,” she writes. “For much of the film the Bride is more an idea of female empowerment than a person.”
“But there is a turning point, and the film soars excitingly toward the end from there,” James emphasizes. “Even when The Bride! is short on emotion, its bold vision is exhilarating.”
But The Daily Beast’s Nick Schager is betting that Buckley’s reps are happy that Warner Bros. delayed The Bride! until after the final Oscar voting period ends. “The Oscars’ Best Actress frontrunner drops monstrous misfire,” reads the headline of his mixed take, which notes that Gyllenhaal’s movie “aims high and falls short.”
“There are instances of genuine beauty in The Bride!” Schager allows. “Scattered throughout this ungainly affair are flashes of the uniquely spiky monster mash that Gyllenhaal apparently envisioned from the start. Nonetheless, those glimpses are few and far between, and ultimately, neither her scattershot showmanship nor her headliners’ maximum-voltage electricity can jolt this corpse of a do-over to thrilling life.”
One of the outright pans comes from The San Francisco Chronicle‘s G. Allen Johnson, who writes: “It is clear that director Maggie Gyllenhaal isn’t interested in making a film about Mary Shelley’s enduring creations. No. She’s making a movie about movies — specifically, her love of movies. This gorgeous piece of eye candy … takes us on a journey, but an aimless one.” Johnson can’t even find something nice to say about Buckley, calling her performance, “a bit too much.”
“When you walk out of the theater feeling more empathy for the tortured monster than his Bride, the experiment has failed,” he concludes.
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