@Courtesy of Universal Pictures

After adapting Elena Ferrante in her remarkable first feature-film as a director, The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal decided to go even further by tackling Mary Shelley and her creatures in a completely free reimagining of the Frankenstein world. The Bride! is in fact a cautionary tale starting in 1936 in Chicago, where Frank (Christian Bale), the monster who lived alone as an outcast for more than one hundred years, asks the scientist Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) to create a soulmate for him.

Of course they need a freshly-passed body, and they find it in a young woman (Jessie Buckley) who, after being reanimated, embarks with Frank in a journey of violence, love and empowerment. 

There is a lot in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s movie, most likely too much, but the final result is in the end definitely entertaining. The starting idea to set the story during the Great Depression and turn it into a sort of Bonnie & Clyde crime spread is effective in order to create the right rhythm for the narration. The director’s focus is to develop a tale about a woman and her journey to re-invent herself, free and emancipated from a world dominated by toxic masculinity. This is the part where Gyllenhaal can’t contain the enthusiasm and insert in the screenplay too many scenes and subplots that make the central part a little too long and repetitive.

One of the best qualities of her movie is the fact that she doesn’t forget the other characters, especially Frank: the monster is a gentle, human, relatable soul in his own pursuit of happiness. The perfect partner for the anti-heroine, because Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale show an outstanding chemistry and at the same time they develop their own characters through different tones in the performances.

If you surround them with other good actors like Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, John Magaro and the always excellent Annette benign, here you have a compelling cast for a bold movie, even if not completely balanced. There are so many ideas, so many references to the history of cinema in The Bride! that in certain moments you get a little too distracted trying to catch every homage. If you are a movie-lover and a previous Frankenstein adaptations, this is without any doubt a cinephile divertissement that you can’t absolutely miss. Our favorite? The dancing moment in which Christian Bale performs like Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein. It couldn’t be otherwise. 

After directing the sharp, intense and quite disturbing The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal went in an opposite direction with a larger than life production. The Bride! is developed through a clear and coherent vision of that universe, endorsed by the brilliant cinematography of Lawrence Sher, by the amazing costumes created by the three-times Academy Award winner Sandy Powell, and by the outstanding production design by Karen Murphy. As a director, Gyllenhaal has achieved an admirable result both visually and with the actors. As a screenwriter on the other hand she should have cut some parts of the script and made the rhythm of the story more suited to the genre.

The Bride! has various sequences of great cinema and others that are quite a drag, making the movie slower and less effective than it could have been. The result is surely positive, but it could have been more straight to the point and entertaining. What will remain in our memory for quite a while is Jessie Buckley’s energetic performance (it is almost inconceivable to think that she is the same actor who delivered such a contained performance in Hamnet…) the tenderness by Christian Bale and the always great Annette Bening. The Bride! is bold, careless, full of ideas. The kind of cinema that, despite its own flaws, we want to keep seeing on big screens. 

Rate: B-

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Here’s the trailer for The Bride!: