There are fewer things I love in film more than a big swing. And if you saw Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2021 directorial debut The Lost Daughter, the last thing you’d expect her to make next would be something like The Bride! And her sophomore film had been pushed back a lot and there’d been rumors of a troubled production. And then the reviews started to come out. Critics I respect were divided on the film. I’d seen people online call it brilliant and also one of the worst movies they’d ever seen. And unfortunately, I could not make it out to a Thursday night preview of The Bride! so I’m late to the party. And as I write this, my showtime of the film ended roughly 4 hours ago and I still can’t quite figure out which side of that divide I live on. So, come with me as my poor mind tries to make sense of The Bride!

In the film’s opening moments, the ghost of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) explains that she died shortly after her novel Frankenstein was published, and there’d been another story she always wanted to tell but couldn’t. Her spirit possesses the body of Ida (also Buckley), a young woman in 1930s Chicago, who soon after is murdered. Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) enlists the help of a mad scientist (Annette Bening) to find him a companion. They dig up the body of Ida, and shortly after, she becomes the titular bride of Frankenstein. People around them start dying, and the two find themselves on the run. Chaos, romance and madness ensue. 

The Bride! earns that exclamation point. Everything negative everyone has said about this film is pretty much indisputable, and yet I was kind of mesmerized by the whole thing and taken by the audacious chutzpah of it all. There is so much going on in The Bride! that is very much for me, and although it only makes sense roughly half the time, I was almost transfixed by it all the way through. The film looks gorgeous, Jessie Buckley is going full camp and is leaning into the wacky, which I can definitely appreciate. The film is simultaneously a throwback to the Universal monster movie, golden age of Hollywood musicals, and about a million other things over the course of two hours. And I’ve always said the worst thing that a movie can be is boring, and The Bride! never bored me for a second.

Jessie Buckley is not even a decade into her career and already we’ve seen her do so much. She’s probably going to win her first Oscar next week for Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, and if you watch that performance and then this performance back to back, (or the first film I saw her in, 2018’s Wild Rose), it will effectively emphasize just what a versatile performer she is. The combined role of Ida and Mary Shelley gives Buckley so much to play with, and this is a very showy, over the top performance in ways I very much enjoyed. She’s leaning into the absurd while Christian Bale is going understated and dialing it down for a change, and the balance of this really makes this wacky dynamic work. 

In the supporting cast, we have Annette Bening having plenty of fun as Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (a perfect mad scientist name). We don’t see Bening enough these days and it’s still not lost on me that she’s one of our best living actresses who still doesn’t have an Oscar. This won’t be the one to do it, but I’m hoping we start to see her in more again. We also have a very miscast Penelope Cruz (in a terrible wig) and Peter Sarsgaard as two detectives attempting to track down Frank and the Bride, and it feels like they’re in an entirely different movie than everyone else, and if the movie wanted to cut down its runtime, these roles could’ve been written out of the script entirely. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the work Sarsgaard and Cruz were doing, it all just felt a bit beside the point. Jake Gyllenhaal also has a glorified cameo as a famous actor who Frank may have worked with once, and is obsessed with. I have no doubt Gyllenhaal is in this film as a favor to his sister, but nevertheless I still always enjoy seeing him onscreen.

If there’s one thing about The Bride! that’s undeniable, it’s the style on display. The film is always doing something weird and different aesthetically and that’s part of the reason the film never bored me. Lawrence Sher is the cinematographer and there’s an unmistakable energy in the camerawork that makes the look of the film consistently exciting. Hildur Guðnadóttir composes the score, and it’s full of a lot of very intense, sweeping musical cues that she’s known for, but it’s also one of those scores that aggressively tells you how to feel in any given moment, and I found that annoying. Martin Scorsese’s usual costume designer Sandy Powell did the costumes, and Buckley is wearing one dress for the majority of the film, but the way this one costume evolves and changes over the course of the runtime is fascinating. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s script may be a bit unfocused and meandering, but it’s also full of ideas so bold and daring I have to respect it anyway. Even if only about half of the film makes sense, I still never knew where her script would take me, and I was totally along for the ride. And The Bride! could not possibly have less in common with The Lost Daughter, and this tells me Gyllenhaal might have a lot more to give us as a filmmaker than I’d originally thought. About half of the script’s ideas work, a lot of it is chaotic and wacky and almost nonsensical, but the script’s shifts in tone seemingly always have purpose. I will say the framing device with Mary Shelley is weird and doesn’t quite work, but it’s still a cool idea. Her script is far from a work of brilliance, but it kept throwing me in directions I wasn’t expecting, and I respect that more than a script that’s boring and safe.

Anything negative anyone could say about The Bride! is probably true on some level. The film is a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess, and I was always on board for whatever ridiculous thing it did next. It’s a visually striking and sometimes viscerally shocking good time, and it’s a great showcase for all Jessie Buckley can do. I love going to see a movie with polarizing reactions, because if there’s a film people are decidedly loving or hating, it’s more exciting to me than a shoulder shrug of a film. And there’s a very strong chance The Bride! will not work for you at all, so take this recommendation with a huge grain of salt. And the film is flopping right now, audiences aren’t responding to it, which I’m not surprised by. But I think The Bride! has cult film potential, and I think a lot of people will eventually come around to it. The film is strange and thrilling, and even if it ends up aggressively not for you, the experience of a big budget studio film swinging this wildly for the fences is much more exciting than the majority of what we see these days.