Static electricity

A risky, ambitious and fabulous mess for the first half, an aimless and frustrating mess for the second, writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second feature is a fiercely feminist American gothic take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Gyllenhaal (who made her directorial debut with 2021’s The Lost Daughter) starts here with Mary Shelley herself (Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley), who may be long dead but has a lot more to say. To do so she takes possession of Ida (also Buckley), a gangster moll in 1930s Chicago.

Entertaining some hoods at a night club, Ida suddenly breaks into rolling British phraseology, speaking out for silenced, stifled and suffocated women everywhere. The mobsters not much liking this speech, Ida soon ends up buried in a pauper’s grave.

Meanwhile, Frankenstein’s monster — understandably, he prefers to be called Frank — is visiting the office of Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening). The immensely lonely Frank (Christian Bale in rather endearing prosthetics) is hoping the doctor will create a companion for him.

These two plots come together in the doc’s standard mad-scientist laboratory. It will be Ida who is “re-invigorated” by electrical jolts and chemical infusions that leave her hair frazzled and mouth stained black.

The Bride awakes with no clear memories — sometimes channelling Ida, sometimes Mary, with accent shifting accordingly — but always wayward, wanton and ungovernable.

Frank and the Bride are soon chased out of town by a mob with torches — Frank has experienced this before, having been around since the early 1800s.

The pair head out on a rampaging road trip, dogged by flatfooted detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard, who is also Gyllenhaal’s husband) and his “secretary,” Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), a sharp-dressed dame who is clearly doing all the police work.

It’s a sweetly tentative romance, an uneven screwball comedy and occasionally a horror story, with some violence, gore and goop. There are big set-pieces, fantasy sequences and musical numbers — the filmmaker’s brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, appears as Ronnie Reed, a dapper song-and-dance man.

Gyllenhaal is riffing on James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein but also Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. She’s nodding to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. She’s covering the English Romantics, Herman Melville and the guy who wrote Monster Mash.

The too-muchness sometimes works. There’s a lot of visual interest, with good-looking production design and great costuming, and a lot of maniac energy, at least for the first hour.

But too often these various parts are stitched together awkwardly, rather like poor old Frank. Gyllenhaal’s crowded, competing themes and modes still have the staples and bolts showing.

The cast is good but often underutilized in the proliferating subplots.

Bale gives a surprisingly tender performance. The usually incomparable Buckley is fearless and full-throttle — she’s really leaning into the exclamation mark in the title — but her performance eventually feels unrelenting. (Also, Mary’s habit of popping in and reeling off archaic 19th-century synonyms gets tiresome quickly.)

We sense that Gyllenhaal is fuelled by anger with the way women’s stories are often sidelined, an issue in Shelley’s time that persists in contemporary Hollywood. She presents the Bride as both creator and creature, an embodiment of female rage and the monstrous feminine.

It’s an important message, but one that feels both underdeveloped and overly textbookish. Despite all that undeniable electrical energy, The Bride! never quite comes to life.

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