Movie Review: Maggie Gyllenhaal's 'The Bride!' is a Frankenstein riff with a pulse

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!”

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” is a big, brash swing at a new “The Bride of Frankenstein” that struggles to cohere its many parts. But I’ll say this for it: It’s alive.

Just months after Guillermo del Toro presented his lavish “Frankenstein,” Gyllenhaal, in her follow-up to her excellent 2021 directorial debut, “The Lost Daughter,” has set her sights on reimagining 1935’s “The Bride of Frankenstein.” The sequel starred Boris Karloff and, in the dual role of the Bride and Mary Shelley, Elsa Lanchester.

But in “The Bride of Frankenstein,” the shock-haired Bride is only on screen for a handful of minutes at the end of the film. Gyllenhaal, who also wrote her film, has corrected the imbalance, refashioning the story from the Bride’s perspective and concocting a protagonist of unfiltered feminist fury. As played by Jessie Buckley, she is both a victim of male control and a reanimated avenging angel.

Buckley is also, like Lanchester was, Shelley. In the movie’s opening moments, Shelley speaks from the beyond directly to us. She has a story, she says, that’s been stuck inside her, like a dream or a tumor. “What I wanted to say, I couldn’t,” she says. “I couldn’t even think it.”

So Gyllenhaal has placed her story not in the early 19th century, when “Frankenstein” was written, or in the present day, but in the 1930s, around when “The Bride of Frankenstein” came out. When Frankenstein’s monster, here simply “Frank” (Christian Bale), stumbles along, he’s been lonely for not just a few years but a century.