Within the coming week, Jessie Buckley is almost certainly going to win the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Her performance in Hamnet, which we raved about in these very pages in January, has become an awards season steamroller, and the Kerrywoman is well on track to become the first-ever Irish woman to win the Best Actress trophy.
For Buckley’s sake, she should hope voters didn’t see her performance in The Bride, or the trophy might get taken off her.
Buckley reunites with director Maggie Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker who directed her to her first Oscar nomination in 2021 for The Lost Daughter, and the reunion of star and director results in one of the year’s most frustrating films.
The Bride attempts to do for Bride Of Frankenstein what Joker did for the comic book villain in 2019.
Joker is an obvious frame of reference for what Gyllenhaal is doing here, and both films have a lot in common; they are insufferable dross.
Bride Of Frankenstein is the high watermark of the Universal monster movie era; everything that was so brilliant about the 1931 is even better in the sequel, and director James Whale infuses the film with his queer sensibilities.
Any horror scholar worth their salt cites Bride Of Frankenstein as the peak of the genre, meaning that any modern iteration of it had major boots to fill.
The Bride breaks its ankle in an attempt to get the boots on.
From minute one, The Bride loses the audience; in black-and-white close-up, Buckley appears as Mary Shelley herself, the novelist of Frankenstein, explains that the brain tumour that killed her in real life was the source of the inspiration for her novels, and she wishes to live again.
Purists complained that Guillermo del Toro’s take on Frankenstein was taking liberties with the source material, but they will surely have a conniption with this film’s take on the Mary Shelley mythos.
Directors taking major liberties with source material have become a new trend – the Del Toro Frankenstein and the recent Wuthering Heights also spring to mind – and The Bride is part of the new wave.
In the case of Gyllenhaal, she is taking the bones of a classic and turning it into, rather fittingly, a Frankensteined mash-up of Wild At Heart, Natural Born Killers, and Bonnie and Clyde.
On paper, this sounds great, the decision to set the film in the 1930s allows the film to play around with the social issues and technology of the time, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Bride Of Frankenstein still stands the test of time over 90 years after release because James Whale inserted a distinct queer subtext into the film; Maggie Gyllenhaal’s clever take is to attempt to make the film a feminist parable.
A great remake or update of old source material has a director with something to say; Del Toro wanted to make his Frankenstein mesh with his overarching philosophy of treating the monster with awe and wonder, and Gyllenhaal comes close to saying something insightful about how women take ownership of their own stories.
In press for the film, Gyllenhaal has discussed how female directors are not afforded the same leverage given to male directors, and the most interesting parts of this film are when that level of frustration bleeds into the script.
The first half of the film is truly dire; in the second half of the film, when it slows down, stops ripping off Joker, and expands on the world of the film a bit, it slightly recovers.
What could have been the strongest parts of the film – women have been inspired by The Bride taking a stand against the men who ruined their lives – are brushed aside and reduced to quick asides.
It’s not like The Bride is trying to be a subtle movie – it literally starts with a 4th wall break – and The Substance proved that a film can be sledgehammer blunt and still have something to say about female agency.
The number one rule in screenwriting is show, don’t tell – if the film wants to go full revisionist and imagine a feminist retelling of Frankenstein, it has earned the right; as it stands, it comes tantalisingly close to having something profound to say.
That one lingering thread is what saves the film from being an out-and-out disaster, but it’s also deeply frustrating as it hints at a much better film.
The frustration with the film comes from Buckley’s performance; she is aiming for a combination of 90s PJ Harvey or Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns, but comes across more as Dan Aykroyd in Nothing But Trouble.
A great actor turning in a bad performance is worth writing home about, and Buckley’s performance here is uniquely bad.
She is tasked with playing three different characters – Mary Shelley, Ida (the woman whose corpse is used for the experiment), and The Bride – and she’s somehow bad as all three.
Wagner Moura’s performances in The Secret Agent are quiet, and he brings a subtle, regal quality to all of the characters he plays; Buckley is on the opposite end of the spectrum, it’s 90s Al Pacino levels of hammy.
It’s not like Buckley can’t go big – her performances in her season of Fargo or Wicked Little Letters are proof of that – but you almost feel bad for her here.
It takes two to tango, as the saying goes, and Buckley is joined by Christian Bale as Frankenstein’s Monster.
There is no question of Bale’s talent – his performance as Patrick Bateman has become borderline mythological among younger generations – but there is a distinct sense that Bale does not have a handle on the character.
Bale, and the script, cannot decide if the monster is supposed to be a monster, or a misunderstood, fragile soul.
Boris Karloff’s performance as Frankenstein, all the way back in the 1930s, is still what people think of when they think of movie monsters – Christian Bale’s take is not going to enjoy the same fate.
A film can overcome a bad script if the lead performances are good, but that isn’t the case here.
Buckley and Bale try their best Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage in Wild At Heart impression, but are more like an annoying couple who dress up as Harley Quinn and The Joker for Halloween.
At the end of the day, The Bride is more of an interesting failure than an outright debacle; a two-star film that wildly overshoots its ambition and tries to do something different.
We’d much rather watch an ambitious failure with a clear vision than the latest run-of-the-mill superhero film.