The Bride

It is hard to review a film like The Bride. It is not the average "bad movie", which is bad because it shows that their creators had no original ideas or did the bare minimum. You can see that it is truly a passion project for director Maggie Gyllenhaal, who managed to collect a budget of $80 million for a very free and feminist reinterpretation of the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, in which Jessie Buckley plays a dual role of the Bride and Mary Shelley herself talking from beyond the grave, paying tribute to 1930s gangster movies, horror movies and musicals.

It is the kind of author-blockbuster movie that Warner Bros. takes pride in producing (like Ryan Coogler's Sinners), allowing talented authors to unleash their creativity with (almost) no creative or budgetary boundaries. The Bride is hugely ambitious, and you can sense that the movie is filled with stimulating ideas in both its themes and visual language. Sadly, all those elements don't add up for a an enjoyable movie. Instead, it is a confusing mess that feels much longer than the 126 minutes it lasts, and lacks the depth to make any thoughtful commentary, nor anything too shocking to provoke any visceral emotion, other than bewilderment and tedium.

The biggest problem is that you never establish a real connection with the main character, the Bride. The movie's opening scene, in which Buckley's character Ida, a escort of a mob boss, is "possesed" by Shelley and gives up an incomprehensible and unbearebly long speech, sets the tone for the weird adventure that awaits her: after her death, she is revived by Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) when Frankenstein's monster (who is said to have been alive since 1818, the year when Shelley's novel was was publised) begs for a bride to end with his loneliness.

There is occasionally chemistry between "Frank" (Christian Bale) and Buckley's The Bride, but their relationship doesn't develop in coherent ways, so you can't really feel anything for them. I'm sure that Gyllenhaal had clear ideas about what Frank's love for musical movies or the Bride's dual-personality speeches symbolise, but for anyone watching the film they come up as bizarre creative decisions that don't make much sense and get in the way of building believable characters, and that ends up derailing the film because you don't really care.

Not everything can be justified with "you just don't get the film". Without a good story to grip you, all you can do is guess about second meanings and catch classic cinema references, but everything feels shallow, the film trying to outsmart you with elusive eccentricities and drastic tonal and plot changes that probably come from editing the many expensive reshoots. The film starts focusing on the relationship between Frank and the Bride but, as said, neither (especially her) have a defined characterization to build a believable romance.

Then it turns into a musical, but only once and without a clear reason why. It is not a good musical number anyway, and it feels forced and out of nowhere, contributing to the feeling that the movie just wants to be weird and unpredictable for the sake of it without a solid foundation to keep our interest. Then it becomes a Bonnie & Clyde type of thriller film (or at least copies the visual style), while presenting a feminist social revolution in the style of Todd Phillips' Joker which comes out of nowhere, doesn't really make sense narratively, and is almost never referred to it again.

In between Frank and Ida's increasingly boring story, the detectives played of Penélope Cruz and Peter Sarsgaard add some interest and temporarily disguise the movie of a cat-and-mouse gangster film (without really committing to it). Unsurprisingly, they also end up being wasted potential: their reason to be in the film is only explained in the last 15 minutes, filled with rushed exposition, and is not a very convincing reason. They could be removed entirely from the film and it would change nothing.

It is so sad that The Bride ends up being so weak, because the production design is great: it is not easy to set a movie in the 1930s without making it look cheap or fake. Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale with their monster make up is already iconic, and they display their acting skills, despite frequently being forced to overact.

But that the visual aesthetics are the only positives of a movie with so many bold ideas is extremely disappointing. A lot of ideas, yes, but so poorly executed that it's almost impossible to enjoy, with nothing remarkable behind the surface to at least say 'ok, I get it'. The Bride's only hope is to some day become a cult movie by people willing to fill the huge gaps between its many pieces.