The Bride! (15, 127 mins)

Verdict: It’s alive! And it’s a mess!

Rating:

Jessie Buckley is currently blazing a Best Actress streak all the way to the Oscars for her transcendent turn in Hamnet. 

She’s such an astonishing actress that I’d pay to watch her in anything… even The Bride!, an ambitious, punk rock, feminist spin on Frankenstein which, without her, would fall apart.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1818. It has spawned innumerable spin-offs – none of them penned by Shelley – including The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935), a cult camp movie in which ‘The Bride’ appears for just two minutes and doesn’t utter a word.

Jessie Buckley – who has received rave reviews for her role in Hamnet – stars in The Bride! as a punk rock, feminist spin on Frankenstein

The film also features Frankenstein’s monster, aka ‘Frank’ (Christian Bale), who is crushingly lonely after more than a century on his ownsom

The Bride! sets out to correct that – giving its heroine not just one voice but, confusingly (a lot of this is confusing), two.

The story, as far as I can tell, is this: Mary Shelley (Buckley) is trapped in limbo. But somehow she beams herself into the body of Ida (Buckley again), a gangster’s moll in 1930s Chicago. 

Soon afterwards, Ida is killed. However (keep up!), she is then dug up from her grave and reanimated by a ‘mad scientist’ (Annette Bening) in order to provide a mate for Frankenstein’s monster, aka ‘Frank’ (a too-handsome Christian Bale), who is crushingly lonely after more than a century on his ownsome.

Frank christens his bride ‘Penelope’, as you do; and the pair set off on a chaotic, Bonnie and Clyde-ish spree (minus the bank robbing), where Penny’s outspoken, sexually outrageous, down-with-the-patriarchy attitude triggers an empowering cultural quake: prompting women of all ages to adopt her signature black lipstick look and wild, unladylike ways.

Basically, this is a whole lot of movie. It’s a love story, a gothic thriller, an on-the-run caper, a body horror, a comedy, a steam-punk fantasy, a crime drama, a musical – and a hot mess. 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1818 and has spawned innumerable spin-offs – with ‘The Bride!’ being the latest

But you can’t fault it for not taking big swings. The Bride! is the brainchild of actor-turned-film maker Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose Oscar-nominated 2021 directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, also starred her self-declared ‘soul sister’ Buckley.

Her new film is a family affair, featuring not just that soul sister but her real-life husband Peter Sarsgaard, as a detective (with Penélope Cruz oddly wasted as his patronised female sidekick), and her brother Jake Gyllenhaal as a Fred Astaire-esque movie star, whom Frank idolises.

Bale’s soulful ‘Frank’ is undoubtedly the sidekick in this show. Gyllenhaal reportedly had to fight the studio to secure Buckley’s services – a victory that must be particularly sweet now, given the Oscars buzz trailing her leading lady. That won’t hurt at the box office.

And the Irish actress’s performance is every bit as fearless as Emma Stone’s, when she played another re-animated female corpse in (the superior) Poor Things. 

But she brings to it a glorious humanity that’s all her own.

You may not love The Bride!, but be glad it exists. In an era where Hollywood is increasingly risk-averse, you have to admire an original studio movie, from a female director, that aims high and winds up being too much to handle. 

It’s a bit like “Wuthering Heights” in that regard (and in its annoying punctuation marks).

Not a monstrous disaster. More a case of something old, something new, something borrowed – but lacking glue.