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The Bride! is not the full title they wanted judging by the poster. It was never going to happen but the expletives certainly fit with the tone of the film and they do make sense of the exclamation mark.

The whole thing starts off with the ghost of Mary Shelley (strangely here presented as an odd potty mouthed mix of Mary Poppins, Rosalind Russell and Perez Hilton) who finds a release from the purgatory she has apparently been trapped in for eighty years when she possesses a gangster’s moll in 1930s Chicago. It seems that the novel that made her famous was not quite the one she wanted to write and now she sees an opportunity to tell the proper story by living it, or something. Almost immediately though, this young woman is killed and then, in what has to the biggest coincidence ever, the real Frankenstein’s monster turns up (even though we’d literally just confirmed that he is indeed a fictional character) and he’s looking for a freshly dead lady to reanimate to be his life partner. What then follows is a spooky Bonnie & Clyde tale where he is an hundred and ten year old stitched together zombie and she is a troubled mob girl who keeps Smeagol/Golluming between two opposing personalities; hers and Shelley’s. Other than the deliberate feminist themes (happy International Women’s Day btw), it is hard to think that this is what Mary Shelley did truly have in mind.

I respect everyone involved for their intentions here. The Bride of Frankenstein, who never really comes to life in the original source material, has been cemented in history as the pale woman with the two tone shock beehive from the 1935 movie. As it is she barely even appears in that film and does not have any lines so it is time she had some real time in the spotlight and some stuff to do. Incidentally people who describe this brief but iconic appearance as actor Elsa Lancaster’s greatest contribution to cinema, are forgetting that she was also Katie Nanna in Mary Poppins. In fact this might explain this aspect of Shelley’s aforementioned characterisation in this new film, as director Maggie Gyllenhaal is liberally borrowing from every past movie with any association to her subject matter, from Metropolis to Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein.

The result is scrappy and overloaded, and it’s certainly a bit nuts, but it holds together. Some people have said it’s messy but I don’t think that’s right. Some side players are under developed, okay maybe all of them, but they all serve the narrative as they need to. 

It is interesting that this has come out so swiftly after Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein but it doesn’t work as a spiritual sequel. Jacob Elordi’s creature is a very different beast to Christian Bale’s who comes much more from the classic Hammer Horror model, with perhaps a touch of DeNiro. The star of the movie is clearly Jessie Buckley though. Buckley’s first significant brush with fame was for almost getting cast as Oliver’s Nancy in the BBC Show I’d Do Anything and even though she didn’t eventually win that part, her career has been defined, to the point of being typecast, by playing women who share that character’s unbound, fierce independence. The Bride compounds this and hopefully closes the door on it to some extent. She is great in this role but it’s the type we’ve effectively seen from her before.

In terms of the feminist elements, the title character here is most certainly a confident woman with huge agency but she does too often need rescuing, is defined by victimhood and falls for a man who is totally gaslighting her. It is interesting to set her against the female police detective played by Penelope Cruz, and the two feel some sisterhood at the end (at least in one direction). One is railing against the injustice of a man’s world while the other is taking it on quietly. The mad scientist here is also a woman but her grasp on control is highly challenged. If the intention of ghost Mary Shelley, or indeed filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal, was to reclaim a classic of Victorian Gothic Literature and give it a female spin free of patriarchal influence, I think the success has been mixed. 

I was entertained by The Bride! but it isn’t the iconoclastic cage rattler it could have been. Maybe watch the other one on Netflix instead.