The Bride!: Gorgeous to Look At, Dead on Arrival

Watching The Bride! felt like crashing a costume party where no one explains the theme but everyone is deeply smug that it’s “obvious.”

The opening scene gives us the ghost of Mary Shelley bathed in dramatic lighting reciting… something.  Is it profound?  Is it gibberish?  Hard to say but it certainly sounded important. Then we smash-cut to a 1930’s nightclub where Jessie Buckley’s character Ida (who eventually becomes The Bride,) starts glitching between British aristocrat and Chicago dame like she downloaded two characters and neither installed properly.  It’s incredible to watch.  Not because it makes sense but because Buckley commits completely.  I genuinely thought there might be some medical explanation: brain tumor, split personality? Nope.

Then Ida dies and gets resurrected because Frankenstein’s monster (“Frankie” apparently,) is lonely and needs a girlfriend.  Not just any girlfriend of course.  Specifically a resurrected one.  When the Bride finally rises I have to admit she looks incredible.  The hair, the dye smeared across her face, the black dripping from her ears, the fingers that look like she’s been finger-painting with radioactive material.  It’s bizarre and gorgeous all at once.  The film’s visual imagination is never the problem.  The plot, on the other hand, seems to be off in another room having a nervous breakdown.

Explanations? None.  Why is Jake Gyllenhaal channeling Fred Astaire with the intensity of someone in a fugue state?  Why are the monsters spending half the movie drifting from movie theater to movie theater like film students?  What’s with the sudden Me Too/The Joker uprising, followed by an unexpected pivot into Bonnie and Clyde cosplay?  By this point my brain had packed a small suitcase and quietly left the theater.  The film looks outrageously expensive and Jessie Buckley deserves an award for Most Committed to Total Narrative Disorder.  The story, meanwhile, deserves to be studied as a hate crime against coherence.  The real monster in The Bride! isn’t the mad scientist or the creation.

It’s the script.