Jessie Buckley achieves such a fine and daring visual effect as the reanimated Bride that for a little while there, I thought writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal might really have locked into something interesting with her second film.
Kudos, at any rate, to the actor (Buckley) and the costumer (Sandy Powell) and the makeup artist (Nadia Stacey). But after a few initial thrills, the addled neo-gothic vision of Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, loosely inspired by the splendid horror classic Bride of Frankenstein (1935) gets more strained and incoherent and exhausting as it goes on. And good grief, does it go on. Almost every scene seems to last too long, and the plot keeps veering in the least interesting directions, till by the late climactic scenes that are presumably supposed to pack an emotional punch, it’s hard to care anymore about the fate of the undead lovers, the Bride and Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale).
But let’s return to the hopeful beginning. The film starts with Mary Shelley (also played by Buckley), author of the 1818 source novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, trapped in post-death black-and-white limbo. She’s ranting wryly about her tragic life and thwarted creativity. She has a lot more to say beyond her most famous book, and she intends to say it posthumously by possessing a latter-day woman, a mid-1930s hard case in rough circumstances. “Let’s call her Ida, at least until she finds her own name,” says Mary.
And so we move into full color and meet “Ida,” a tough “bar girl” of her times, paid to entertain low-life gangsters in a dive eatery. Things swiftly go south for Ida as she’s possessed by Mary and spooks her companions by switching dangerously back and forth between her own brand of twentieth-century Chicago sass and Mary’s nineteenth-century upper-class British denunciations of men in power. The gangland capo, Lupino (Zlatko Burić ), seated nearby, isn’t pleased to be called out in public for his…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
