The director and ‘The Bride!’ Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jessie Buckley dare you to meet your monster

Maggie Gyllenhaal turns “The Bride!”

Maggie Gyllenhaal had earned a little currency as a filmmaker and wanted to make something big. Something epic. Something honest. Something that wouldn’t just hit a vein, as she’d done with her first film, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter,” but burst it wide-open. She wanted there to be blood all over the room — both proverbially speaking and, in the case of her new film “The Bride!” literally too.

What started as a curiosity about an image of Elsa Lanchester’s “Bride of Frankenstein” she saw on a tattoo, evolved, through her wild imagination, into one of the year’s most audacious, electric films. Like her studio brethren “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another,” “The Bride!” is a kind of genre-defying spectacle that’s bursting with personality and full of things that the filmmaker loves. It’s got romance, action, dancing, matinee idols, professional women, big ideas, thorny themes and Jessie Buckley, a kindred spirit who, like Gyllenhaal, is fascinated by the idea of meeting your monster.

“Both Jessie and I … we’re interested in the edges of what we know about ourselves, and the edges of what we know about ourselves in relation to the world and really getting into a place where we can learn something,” Gyllenhaal said.

After working half her life as an actor in Hollywood and on the stage, Gyllenhaal has found her calling as a filmmaker. In front of the camera, her ideas, her intelligence, her creativity were only occasionally valued or even heard. Behind the lens, it was a different story. Her first film was a small one, made for around $5 million, but it made a splash with three Oscar nominations, for her actors, Buckley and Olivia Colman, and her adapted screenplay. “The Bride!” shot her to another level.

“I was curious to know what would happen if I was very honest, as honest as I could manage to be, in a different format, in a much bigger format, in a pop, hot, roller coaster ride of a format?” Gyllenhaal said.