Maggie Gyllenhaal Gets Her Rage on

For all the couple of unspoken minutes Elsa Lanchester appears as the “Bride of Frankenstein” in James Whale’s 1935 movie, Maggie Gyllenhaal was left wondering, “What’s she thinking?”

Whatever Dr. Frankenstein’s Bride was thinking under her conically shaped head of electrocuted hair apparently didn’t amount to much, as the exasperating new film from the Oscar-nominated writer/director of “The Lost Daughter” and star of “Secretary” and “The Deuce” inadvertently manages to prove. What “The Bride!” does amount to is a kind of #AskHerMore the movie for our horror-besotted, IP-ravenous times, a wokified, “Joker”-fied feminist opera — and with punk-rock patches on its sleeves — that feels caught in the drain somewhere between 2017 and 2020, a tale of female oppression curiously behind the times despite purporting to be a movie for right this minute.

Directing Jessie Buckley in an anguished scream of a performance, Gyllenhaal has said in press interviews that she wanted to tell “the truth” in the package of a pop entertainment. The truth about what?

What “The Bride!” — with the most insistent punctuation mark in its title since Emerald Fennell put air quotes around “Wuthering Heights” barely a month ago — adds up to is a thuddingly one-note sustained yowl of rage directed at, what, exactly? All the men in the world? All the men in the world that suppressed the here-revisionist proposal that “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley wanted to write a deeper sequel about the Bride? At a moment when audiences are more than ready to embrace complicated women characters, “The Bride!” just comes off as retrograde, anchored by a thrashing protagonist who is hardly complicated and instead sustained by nothing but a routinely stacked chord of anger, pain, and more pain — just with supernatural powers this time.

Buckley, with her now trademark dislocated jaw of a primal scream that is persistently featured in the “Hamnet” clip about to help win her a (yes, deserved) Best Actress Oscar, is a firehose of anger, sure, but it’s one with no specific fire to put out, instead as directionlessly spewing as the many, many ideas Gyllenhaal throws at the wall that don’t stick so much as form a pastichey plaque that whiffs conspicuously of DC Studios. With “Joker” and “Joker: Folie à Deux” cinematographer Lawrence Sher and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir assigned to “The Bride!” to seemingly repeat much of those previous films’ sensibility, you can almost feel the machinations behind the scenes of Warner Bros. wanting to eventually stitch this Bride into the DC fabric, to perhaps pave the way toward the first De Luca-and-Abdy, Gunn-and-Safran crossover.

The movie begins with “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley herself (Buckley) in some kind of psychic communion with a woman named Ida (also Buckley), or is it a split personality? You decide, though I don’t believe Gyllenhaal was intending any ambiguity with an obfuscating device that feels like the clumsy byproduct of relentless screen-testing, which this film underwent (and whose practice at all this film should be a case study for undermining). And when a full-throated Shelley announces, “Here comes the motherfucking Bride!” upon the film’s title card, you’re left digging in your brain for the last time a movie so obviously articulated the very tagline of its poster.

Ida, meanwhile, is a crime society floozy in 1930s Great Depression Chicago, an escort to a coterie of goombahs who take to mentally torturing her over dinner and drinks in a speakeasy. She’s also… possessed? If not now, she sure will be. Absinthe-eyed, she projectile-vomits blunt observations and also oysters onto the heavies, overimbibing her way into her own grave once she’s inevitably discarded with a shot and shove down a stairwell (a barely-there John Magaro plays one of the gangsters).

Meanwhile, across town… “Frank” Frankenstein (Christian Bale, again slimming down to wastrel level for a role it seems like we’ve seen from him before, even though we haven’t) is a walking wound in desperate search of “an intercourse,” as he tells scientist Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening, numb). Bale, festooned in a creature design as authentic as a Halloween makeup kit from Party City, is looking to fashion a woman for sex and conversation, and he’s specifically after a Ginger Rogers redheaded type. (An obsession with MGM musicals is here a cute wrinkle to the Frankenstein mythology.)

Cut to Dr. Euphronious and Frank grave-robbing Ida’s sarcophagus, her corpse outfitted to a slab in her laboratory, brought back to life by tubes attached and “Poor Things”-style cathodes hooked up. Upon one very uncomfortable resurrection, Ida-turned-The-Bride gets the requisite gaslighting, Frank telling her she was once his “fiancée,” but this is one pissed-off cookie too smart, and smarted, to buy a line like that.

From the platinum shock of Buckley’s hair to outré fashions of the kind that unapologetically flamboyant costumer Sandy Powell might perhaps wear herself, the Bride’s look is more “Birds of Prey” harlequin than Vera West (who, uncredited of course, costumed Whale’s film). Like Cruella de Vil stuck her finger in an electrical outlet, or a steampunk Harajuku girl from hell, a mental patient escaped from the Hot Topic pop-up at Arkham Asylum — which only again, even without DP Sher and composer Guðnadóttir plagiarizing themselves, underscores how much this movie starts to look gallingly like a Warner Bros. Discovery franchise hopeful waiting to be grafted into the studio’s movie-series bible.

Packed with 1930s and ’40s MGM musical references including even a certain someone especially close to Gyllenhaal as a Fred Astaire stand-in, “The Bride” then unspools like a Gothic “Bonnie and Clyde” or Bauhaus-laden, vaudeville “Sid and Nancy,” a “Natural Born Killers” kind of lovers-on-the-run story except… not good? Buckley and Bale’s chemistry has no juice from the start, the characters too wrapped up in grotesque prosthetics and inky makeup and gender polemics to generate real heat between them.

It all ends in a rain of bullets directly quoting Warner Bros.’ 1967 “Bonnie and Clyde,” another misfired opportunity for the studio to launder in the case for its library of vintage all-timers that are fast and vastly disappearing from consciousness and, surely, eventually, streaming and physical media libraries and linear TV networks — but without any determinable reason for doing so. Along the road of The Bride and Frank’s orgiastic spree, a Berlin-like underground club called Depravation (applause to Gyllenhaal for bringing Swedish music artist Fever Ray to the big screen) could’ve been a showstopping setpiece. Instead, we get something closer to last-call, lights-up at Berghain.

In fleshly human terms, The Bride learns that her sensuous nerve endings are still very much active, and yes, if you were ever wondering, Frank “Frankenstein” can, in fact, get it up as confirmed by a scene in which The Bride lustily licks his wounds and then goes down on him in a drained gymnasium swimming pool. Despite some weird Cronenberg-lite sex and more than one disarticulated tongue, “The Bride!” is disappointingly tame in its efforts to push the borders of good taste — again, likely the result of an over-trust in screen tests in American malls whose audiences perhaps aren’t the best marriage to potentially salacious, sordid material.

On the run and, also, screaming into the void a lot doing it, The Bride and Frank carve a trail of dead bodies that takes them from Chicago to New York, to Times Square movie palaces in which preshows label them a monstrous couple after they’ve killed a group of men that tried to assault her back in Illinois. (One plaudit for what a reported $80 million will get you: at least this film’s soundstage version of New York looks full of actual people.)

Trailing behind them is detached gumshoe Detective Jake Wiles (played by Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard) and his more qualified, competent Girl Friday, Myrna Mallow (like Myrna Loy, the ’30s movie star. Get it? She’s played by Penélope Cruz). What “The Bride!” coughs up in the shape of a plot emerges as frustratingly half-digested to the point of illegibility, as Detective Wiles and Buckley’s Ida share an embittered personal history stemming from her mafia days; it’s a narrative the movie never really needed to keep moving, but without it, “The Bride!” wouldn’t have much story to speak of.

It doesn’t feel especially good to kick down an emerging female filmmaker on her first studio effort, especially at a moment when Hollywood (and particularly within this film’s studio, Warner Bros.) is imperiled to what some believe to be nearing-exctinction levels. It’s understandable that Gyllenhaal would not feel content to stick to “little movies” like her 2021 Elena Ferrante adaptation “The Lost Daughter,” also working from the words of a female author who has spent much of her life cloaked in anonymity. That film sagely tapped into feelings in motherhood often forbidden from discussion, finding a potent gender-political message without saying it crassly, or explicitly, or expressly at all.

“The Bride!” is full of rage and feeling, striking an anarchic pose against oppression. But who it’s yelling at, who it’s yelling on behalf of, remains out of focus, the mystery of whatever Elsa Lanchester’s Bride might’ve been thinking left unanswered.

Grade: C-

“The Bride!” opens in theaters Friday, March 6 from Warner Bros. Pictures.

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