The Bride! begins with a woman we’ll call Ida (Jessie Buckley).
Ida works as an escort, but while partying with a group of suited men, she becomes possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley. When she causes a commotion in the bar and begins accusing a commissioner of murder, the men around her drag her out, “accidentally” pushing her down the stairs and killing her.
Meanwhile, the Frankenstein Monster (Christian Bale) visits Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) and asks her to create a companion for him. For a long time, the Frankenstein Monster has felt a terrible loneliness, and it is agony to bear. He believes that a relationship with someone his kind will save him.
After some hesitation, Dr. Euphronious agrees to his request. So they dig up a body and bring it back to her laboratory, where a contraption returns the unsuspecting woman back to life. That woman is Ida.
Ida wakes up with fragmented memories of her past and no recollection of her name. She is confused, delirious, and stubborn. Mary Shelley’s voice inside her head, combined with the overwhelming sensations and emotions she is suddenly flooded with, makes her go furious and feral. On the other hand, Frankenstein is so in awe of her that he can imagine them singing and dancing together like the couples in his favorite romantic films. He finally has a companion. A bride.
But love is a tricky thing. A creation cannot simply love you back because you created them. They need to define themselves first. And so Ida goes on a journey of rediscovering herself, never really intending to change the world, yet leaving everyone around her forever changed, from Frankenstein to society itself.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has always been a fascinating source material to me. It’s about a man playing God, creating life out of dissected human remains and animal parts. But after Victor Frankenstein realizes that his creation is disgusting and essentially a monster, he abandons it. Because of the rejection, it grows angry, destructive, and desperate for love. A story I think ahead of its time.
The Bride of Frankenstein is barely present in Mary Shelley’s book, though. Victor Frankenstein destroys her out of fear that they might breed an entire race of creatures that could plague mankind. But that never stopped Maggie Gyllenhaal from exploring the ‘could have’ if the Bride of Frankenstein had lived.
Gyllenhaal’s vision of The Bride is wild, erotic, and bewitching. She’s intense and unpredictable. There’s a palpable confusion in the mix as well, alongside a serious need to make sense of her rebirth and to break free from the identity imposed on her. Thus, there are sudden moments of frenzy that leave people hurt and some dead. It’s chaos. And despite how difficult it must have been to pull off, there is nothing but praise for Jessie Buckley’s performance here. She’s so good. Simply enthralling as both Mary Shelley and The Bride.
In contrast is Christian Bale’s Frankenstein Monster. He seems to understand his existence, but not to a point where he has made peace with it yet. Gyllenhaal crafted a creature that feels profoundly lonely, vulnerable, and miserable, and that is honestly one of the most surprising things about this adaptation. He’s a monster you can quickly and easily relate to. Someone who despairingly wants a companion, someone he can build a real relationship with. But he gradually comes to the realization that he cannot own anyone, and that the love he seeks begins with letting someone else go to become their true self.
Because Frank’s loneliness makes him possessive and Ida’s nature makes her impossible to possess, they are the perfect case study of a tragic romance. A love that is doomed from the very beginning. Something that shouldn’t and could never work in real life. But there’s something profoundly beautiful in this tragedy because in the end, the hands of these two still found each other after everything they had to overcome to exist.
Furthermore, there are other threads in the story that explore important themes beyond the love story. There’s Penélope Cruz’s Myrna Mallow, who is constantly dismissed by the police and every institution around her, yet she’s the first one to crack the case. A quiet and powerful testament to the capabilities of women. The tongue motif is a deeply symbolic one and ultimately what ignites women to revolt against the system. Then there’s Mary Shelley, a fictionalized version of herself who perhaps was always opposed to the destruction of the woman Victor Frankenstein created in the novel. Now she returns as a guiding spirit, steering her new creation toward liberation.
You see, The Bride! is deeply layered. On the surface it’s a love story, but look a little closer and you will find that it’s also about identity, feminism, loneliness, grief, power, and cinema. But whatever layer you find yourself in, it’s impossible not to appreciate what Gyllenhaal, Buckley, Bale, and the rest of the cast and crew achieved with this film.
4/5