Flasz On Film

Encouraged by the incredibly warm reception of her directorial debut The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal must have surely decided to up the ante. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet” I imagine she muttered to herself as she conceptualized her return behind the camera. “It’ll be something to behold” I can only expect was the mission statement underpinning Gyllenhaal’s journey to re-adapt, rejig and reinvent the story of Frankenstein. And boy, isn’t that the truth?

The Bride! stars Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard and Jake Gyllenhaal and theoretically perches itself somewhere in the twilight zone between a politically-charged musing on what’s found in the thematic fringes of Shelley’s eponymous novel and a play on how James Whale expanded upon the Frankenstein lore in The Bride of Frankenstein. But not quite really. It is truly something else—a valiant, quixotic attempt at pressurizing this archetypal story with so many thematic externalities, pop cultural tangents, magical realism and outright hyper-stylized cacophony that the movie becomes impossible to summarize without sounding like a stroke victim.

We meet Mary Shelley herself (played by Buckley) who basks in aerated soliloquies as the camera washes over her face in high-contrast monochrome. What leaves her mouth wouldn’t be out of place in an ultra-feminist off-off-Broadway one-woman show or a political installation at the Met. Gyllenhaal doesn’t hold back: we hear all about Shelley’s tragedy of becoming one of the most prominent writers of her time yet cowering behind names of men, her identity obscured. And there’s absolutely no nuance here; no opportunity for interpretation, let alone an invitation for the viewer to do some intellectual legwork. The face on the screen spells everything out. She’s sick and tired of having to bow before the patriarchy. Thus, the tone is set for the entire film.

And then she possesses the body of Ida (also Buckley), a woman living in 1930’s Chicago, who then immediately proceeds to defy the will of her male companions at a dinner party, spill their criminal secrets, mock their manhood and performatively draw attention to her antics. She is then promptly murdered.

Elsewhere in Chicago, Frankenstein’s monster (Bale), who goes by Frank for some reason, arrives at a laboratory of Dr Cornelia Euphronious (Bening), who is both a fan and a continuator of Victor Frankenstein’s seminal research into reviving the dead. He comes with a request to have a female companion revived. Someone to fall in love with, share his time, and go to the movies. Together they revive Ida who remains reluctant and obstinate. Dead or not, Frank is a man and she is done listening to men altogether. But because they are both monstrous freaks of nature, they end up on the run together. Like Bonnie and Clyde: accidental celebrities whose run from the long arm of the law incites a feminist revolution that goes completely underexplored.

And it’s all well and good. Truly. It is frankly undeniable that The Bride! burns with righteous fire of political purification. After all, the movie spells everything out. And there’s a lot of it. So much in fact that there’s very little of what anyone in the movie says—which includes Dr Euphronious, a pair of detectives following the pair of fugitives, gangsters who wish them dead, or even the undead outlaws themselves—that could count as throwaway dialogue or character-building banter. It’s all as subtle as a punch in the nose. Performative and pretentious.

We get it: the movie is supposed to work as an anthem of exasperation. If Shelley had been a man, her writing career would have been different. Dr Euphronious hides her first name behind an initial in scientific publications because a woman in science wouldn’t be taken seriously. Cruz’s Myrna Malloy can only be a detective’s assistant, not a real detective because real detectives are men. Finally, Ida—who is renamed as Penny post mortem—is seen as nothing more than an object of male desire. And the movie is here to tell us all, in no uncertain terms, that enough is enough. I understand. I think we all do. In fact, we have have been on board for a while now.

But the filmmaker is not interested in gentle feedback and ploughs on with her agenda. It becomes clear as day that The Bride! is not here to tell a story that hides its intentions. Instead, it is here to deliver its intentions at sufficient volume to stun the audience so hard that they wouldn’t notice that the story allegedly keeping the movie together didn’t add up to anything dramatically meaningful at all.

I’m sorry to report but Gyllenhaal’s sophomore directorial effort is a piece of pretentious blowhardism completely overwhelmed with its own self-seriousness. This is nothing more than a collection of images loosely strung together in a sequence that makes some student films look inspired in contrast. Full of on-the-nose references, deliberately muddled with discombobulating elements of magical realism, purposefully fragmented and overpowered by near-constant incessant attention-seeking screams, this is unfortunately totally unwatchable. Rarely do we get to see movies so high on their own supply that they completely miss the mark on all aspects of their mission. The story is bland despite its insistence on hyper-stylization. The plot is telegraphed and overshadowed by characters telling me exactly what they feel and think instead of showing any of it. And the characters are somehow totally obnoxious. Nothing works in here. Probably because the story doesn’t even know what it wants to achieve apart from screaming political slogans at me at all times.

In a way, it is a feat of strength to render a play on such a well-known piece of storytelling like Frankenstein not only tedious but otwardly bellicose. Watching The Bride! is akin to willingly getting pepper-sprayed by a storyteller who is so overstuffed with fury that she doesn’t care if the message is delivered with even shreds of grace. Torture is good enough. And it is not as though it was impossible to take Frankenstein and turn it into a piece of stylized artistic chaos that actually has something to say that is (a) worth listening, (b) intriguing to think about and (c) provocative enough to stand apart from the crowd of adaptations of Mary Shelley’s classic novel. Case in point—Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things.

Sadly, The Bride! just doesn’t exist in the same universe as Lanthimos’s opus of explicit weirdness. It is nothing but two hours of pretentious screams about men being pigs with a depth of thought comparable to placard spotted at a feminist rally at a liberal arts college where everyone on campus has been on board with gender equality for years already. Not only is this a steaming mess, but it’s a mess that’s offensive to the senses and the intellect of those brave enough to go out and see it.

So if the intention was to give us something to behold–mission accomplished. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie as pretentious, poorly put together and artistically arrogant in a long while, perhaps since Lost River. Or at least since Malcolm & Marie. In fact, it is closest in spirit to Sam Levinson’s other movie Assassination Nation, which was just as jazzy and unsubtle. But it was not torturous to watch.

Perhaps I only have myself to blame. After all, I should have noticed that a movie so taken with its own import would also make sure that even the title itself would relay its brutally unfiltered pretentious message. The fact it is called The Bride! and not The Bride tells you everything you need to know. It’s an exercise in being screamed at and pummeled relentlessly with a cacophonous and dissonant medley of political messaging, so the inclusion of that exclamation mark is somehow the only aspect of the movie that makes sense to me.