The Bride! Sounds Pretty Awful

I watched Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein a couple months ago. I thought it was excellent, better than Sinners which is the Ryan Coogler vampire movie up for all the Oscars this year. I like Sinners but 16 nominations? It’s not that good.

Anyway, there’s another new take on the Frankenstein story out in theaters this month and it’s getting a lot of a attention. The Bride! was directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, sister of Jake Gyllenhaal. She’s probably best know as the person who played Batman’s love interest in The Dark Knight.

The Bride! isn’t doing very well at the box office. On its opening weekend in 3,300 theaters it made about $7 million domestically. At that pace, it will be gone from theaters by the end of the month and won’t come anywhere close to making back its $90 million budget. And that doesn’t include all the money spent on advertising. According to Deadline, that was another $65 million.

It was a complete rejection by moviegoers around the world this weekend as Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s $80 million bride of Frankenstein monster movie The Bride! opened to $13.6 million…

Industry sources, not Warners, believe the loss on The Bride! could approach $90M in its first cycle after home entertainment downstream. Note, it will be a while before the ultimate red ink is realized. Warner Bros declined comment about the movie’s P&L, which includes $65M in worldwide P&A.

When you add in the fact that some of the box office money stays with the theaters, this film is unlikely to bring in a third of its budget. But why? Is it really so terrible? According to many reviewers, the answer is yes.

Now shambling down the block comes Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a proudly discordant spin on Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel to the classic 1931 Frankenstein movie that probed the titular monster’s desire for a companion. Rebuilding that story around its female lead could have made for a provocatively modern interpretation. Instead, any attempt by Gyllenhaal at conveying a message is drowned out by her film’s overwhelming goofiness.

The Bride! has a little bit of something for everyone: Do you like Fred Astaire musicals? Or throwback gangster pictures? Perhaps you’re in the mood for a girl-power revolution, or maybe you just want to watch a scar-ridden colossus curb-stomp a goon—Gyllenhaal seems to want viewers to have it all, as long as they can tolerate frequent meta-textual references and buckets of gore.

The plot involves Frankenstein’s monster who is in Chicago in the 1930s for some reason. The bride herself is a gangster’s girl who gets murdered and then brought back because the monster needs a friend. And somehow the two of them go on wacky adventures together. That probably makes it sound better than it is.

A clunky framing device, filmed in black and white in an otherwise color picture and recurring throughout the film, features the spirit of “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), who speaks to us from beyond the grave. Amid much vamping and cackling, she tells us that since her death she has been summoning her strength to the point that now, in 1936, she has gained the ability to control the mind of a woman named Ida (also played by Ms. Buckley), who is working undercover as a floozy for the police gathering evidence against a Chicago mobster. With Shelley remote-controlling her brain, Ida turns into a crazed party girl, dies falling down stairs, and goes to her grave. Temporarily…

Ida, after getting a little jump-start in the Euphronious lab, returns to life as the unnamed mate for “Frank,” as she calls him. Spitting up black phlegm and shouting out strings of word-association gibberish, Ms. Buckley quickly becomes the centerpiece of the movie, or rather its central headache. Her overacting meets Ms. Gyllenhaal’s over-filmmaking like the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.

The director would like to be credited (wouldn’t everyone?) with creating a punk-rock update of a classic. What she presents is more like the world’s campiest cabaret act, with the Bride as a mashup of Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis and maybe Natasha Lyonne. Ms. Buckley, talking a mile a minute, flouncing through the sets, and switching accents like a Robin Williams standup routine minus the jokes, is meant to be the ultra-liberated spirit of Woman, a canny chaos agent who doesn’t give a flying fig about patriarchal expectations. She even finds a reason to shout “Me too!” a couple of times.

Quite a few reviews use Frankenstein’s creation out of spare parts as a metaphor for the way this film ties together seemingly random things, none of which really work well together. The stitching holding it all together isn’t careful storytelling, but politics.

…you get the idea before the opening credits even roll; you may as well be reading an academic essay that begins, “In this essay, I will….” It’s possible to identify with women’s collective anger and still find its expression in a movie wanting, and that’s how it is with The Bride!, a movie that offers jolt after jolt of orthodoxy, only to leave you feeling limp and spent rather than energized. Ten minutes in, you’ll be able to outline the picture’s themes, SparkNotes-style. After 40 minutes, you’ll be struggling to stay awake through the lecture. That annoyingly emphatic exclamation mark in the title isn’t just there for looks; it’s emblematic of the movie’s overkill.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a soft spot for feminist horror movies. You don’t have to agree with all of the politics to agree that you can make a good horror movie with a specific slant. But in this case, it sounds like the politics just overwhelmed everything else to the point that it’s not enjoyable.

Despite the ooze and spew that Gyllenhaal splashes across the scenery she isn’t interested in haunting the audience, much less terrifying it. She clearly wants to entertain you, to deliver a little soft shoe and some seductive laughs, yet she also wants to go hard, to peel away skin, dig into wounds and howl. She rallies for women to bite off tongues, not bite their own. And she does just that, though the louder Gyllenhaal rages, the more incoherent the movie becomes with its lurching tones and moods, strained allusions, romantic longing and a post-Weinstein feminist cri de coeur that lands with a thud.

It looks as weird as it sounds. If you’re a little bit curious (or just a glutton for punishment) you probably won’t have to wait long for this one to turn up on streaming video.

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