There are many more direct sequels to James Whale’s Frankenstein than most people realize. Universal made eight Frankenstein movies in the famous monster’s original run across the 1930s & 40s, while most modern audiences’ experience with him stops at the second one: 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, also directed by Whale. Whale was already in a “Okay, now let’s do a goofy one” mood by the time he made Bride, sacrificing some of the haunting beauty of his first Frankenstein film for screwball antics and intentional camp. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new Frankenstein riff is largely going to be interpreted as a feminist reboot of that early Frankenstein sequel, since it directly references a couple of its more outlandish details: the living bell-jar specimens of the mad scientist’s lab and the fact that actress Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley (in the intro) and the titular monster bride (in the finale). Hot off her Oscar-winning performance as the violently grieving mother of Shakespeare’s children in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley is deployed to hit both of those goofball references in The Bride!, briefly appearing as a floating head in a bell jar and, more importantly, pulling double duty as both Mary Shelley’s ghost and the undead woman’s body she possesses. That decision to extend Mary Shelley’s screentime via body possession is part of what pushes The Bride! past its limitations as a Bride of Frankenstein modernization to instead reach the even more ridiculous heights of later Frankenstein sequels like The Ghost of Frankenstein or Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Gyllenhaal has effectively imagined an alternate timeline where Lanchester’s monster had continued to stumble through increasingly goofy Frankenstein sequels the way that Boris Karloff’s did in ours. Instead of spitballing, “Okay let’s put Chaney in the makeup this time, and now Lugosi’s Ygor plays a magical flute that controls him,” like Frankenstein producers of the past, she gets to riff, “Umm I don’t know, now she’s possessed by Mary Shelley’s ghost and we’ll dress up Fever Ray as The Joker or whatever. Let’s hit the road!” To be clear, this is why it rules.
Christian Bale co-stars alongside Buckley as the lit-famous Frankenstein, who assures the audience early on that it’s okay to call him that, since he took his scientist father’s name; for further convenience, he also goes by the nickname “Frank”. Having now roamed the Earth undead and lonely for over a century, he emerges from the shadows of 1930s Chicago to beg a mad-scientist woman in STEM (Anette Benning) to create a bride for him to love. True to the Frankensteins of old, he shows a surprising amount of tenderness & vulnerability for a monster, so the scientist eventually relents to what she initially sees as a piggish request. The corpse she revives as the titular monster bride is a recently murdered sex worker moll (Buckley), killed for her loudmouth blabbing about a local kingpin mobster’s evildoings after becoming possessed by the uninhibited spirit of Mary Shelley’s ghost (also Buckley). Once resurrected, she starts with a clean slate as a bratty agent of chaos who can’t remember much about who she is or why she exists, so she goes on a soul-searching road trip rampage with her newly assigned groom, acting like two giddy teenagers who just ran away from home . . . and who occasionally smash misogynist skulls along the way. They go to queer dance clubs soundtracked by a Jokerfied Fever Ray. They crash cocktail parties held by the wealthy elite, hiding in plain sight because no one would dare look directly at the help, no matter how grotesque. They kill any cops who try to stop their good times’ short, then feel immediate remorse for the transgression. Most importantly, they go to the movies. They go to the movies a lot, which is how they’re easily tracked down by an old-timey lady detective (Penelope Cruz) and her bumbling, good-for-nothing partner (Peter Sarsgaard). The Bride! is hyper aware of its temporal position in the long history of Frankenstein cinema, and it tracks the progression of the artform across a much longer timeline than what its 1930s setting should allow. Its character names are all inspired by Old Hollywood stars like Ida Lupino, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers and, of course, Elsa Lanchester. Jake Gyllenhaal frequently appears as the onscreen avatar for that era, performing Busby Berkeley dance routines that Frank imagines himself dancing along to in his fantasies. It also introduces the 3D craze to its onscreen cinemas decades before The Bwana Devil did so in real life, frequently dips into New Hollywood homage and, in its most blatant effort to modernize the material, has The Bride shout “Me too! Me too!” during her climactic fit of rage. Just like its tone, the timeline of The Bride!‘s vintage cinepehlia is all over the place, as Gyllenhaal seems to be following her own whims scene to scene without worrying too much about whether the audience is following along.
Besides killing cops and hanging out at the movies, another thing these monsters do is fuck. Given that the film includes tender, heartfelt monster fucking and concludes on a needle drop of the Halloween season novelty song “The Monster Mash,” it’s entirely possible that Gyllenhaal’s initial inspiration was cracking up to the recurring “Monster Fuck” bit from Comedy Bang Bang and wondering whether it could be adapted into a feature-length screenplay. Other stylistic influences seemingly include the bratty supervillain goof-around Birds of Prey and the sour-taste supervillain thriller Joker, the latter of which The Bride! shares a composer (Oscar-winner Hildur Guðnadóttir) & cinematographer (Lawrence Sher) with, among 100(!) other below-the-line crew members. As much as they delight me, personally, none of these references are especially revered as recent cultural touchstones, so it’s presumptuous for the film to prepackage a readymade Halloween costume in The Bride!‘s design (crafted by industry legend Sandy Powell) that spreads as a fashion trend among 1930s molls within the film itself. The Bride! has been immediately disregarded as a financial & critical flop, with no way of telling whether it will be reclaimed as a cult classic or forgotten to time in the long run. Any criticisms of it as a shallow work of pop-art feminism will miss the mark on what Gyllenhaal is accomplishing here. Its Feminism 101 political talking points are more than welcome in a cultural climate where teens are constantly bombarded with manosphere & trad-wife propaganda, and I find the dismissals of those themes just as misguided here as they were in the more cynical dismissals of Barbie. More importantly, Gyllenhaal puts too much of her own personal interests & obsessions on the screen for the movie to be seen as pure political allegory. It’s a family affair, with her husband & brother invited along to play silly onscreen. She also gives in to her cringiest Theatre Kid shenanigans, allowing Buckley to run wild with the multiple personalities fighting for dominance in her character’s undead body: the ghost, the monster, and the woman. She also frequently gets lost in the geeky love story shared by her two famous monsters, bringing their Old Hollywood cinephilia into the New Hollywood era via a feature-length homage to 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde. She is suffering from a severe case of Hollywood actor brain here, but the resulting spectacle is so chaotic and so specific to her personal interests that I can’t imagine any other response to it than admiration & delight. It’s like a version of The People’s Joker where Vera Drew had $100mil to play with and grew up obsessed with Frankenstein instead of Batman. Bless her corny heart.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 