The beloved horror sequel The Bride of Frankenstein recently celebrated its 90th anniversary (an occasion marked on the cover of STARBURST issue 492), but as iconic as she’s become, Elsa Lanchester’s title character only appears on screen in that movie for just over two minutes.
Now, writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal has set out to redress that balance with The Bride!, a bold reimagining of the tale. Her radically feminist approach is evident from the opening scene, in which the spirit of Mary Shelley (newly Oscar-winning Jessie Buckley) addresses the camera to tell us that her story as we’ve previously been told it was incomplete, and we’re about to witness the missing chapter.
That chapter takes place in 1930s Chicago, and follows Ida (also Buckley, because why not?) and Frank (Christian Bale), aka Frankenstein’s monster. Looking for companionship, Frank enlists the aid of Doctor Euphronius (Annette Bening), and together they bring back Doctor F’s old methods and resurrect a dead woman – Ida, who’s recently had a fatal fall.
The two former corpses set off on a journey across America, but everywhere they go, they discover that being a monster isn’t easy, and for Ida, being both a monster and a woman doubly so. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the dangers they face, or from the violent methods Frank uses to protect Ida. What begins as an optimistic quest to meet Frank’s favourite silent movie actor Ronnie Reed (Maggie’s brother Jake Gyllenhaal) turns into a brutal bloodbath and a Bonnie and Clyde-esque crime spree – with a dance number in the middle. And the choice of song for that number is one so associated with a different Frankenstein-related movie that you can’t quite believe Gyllenhaal would dare go there, but she does, and through strength of convictions, and having a very different angle on it, it works.
That’s a common strand throughout The Bride! – it’s a maximalist approach to the subject which takes everything it has, every possible idea Gyllenhaal must have thought of, and chucks it forcefully at the screen. A lot of it works, joyfully rattling ahead alongside the soundtrack by Hildur Guðnadóttir and original songs by Swedish electropop musician Fever Ray.
Some of it doesn’t work – Ida’s ‘possession’ by Shelley’s spirit is laboured and unexplained, and a climactic piece of dialogue hammers in the film’s message in a painfully unsubtle manner. But the film moves along with such pace, energy and conviction that it hardly matters. If Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was too by-the-book for your tastes, you couldn’t get a more alternative take than this fabulously punk update.
THE BRIDE! is in UK cinemas now.
