Who knew Frankenstein was so controversial? On the heels of Guillermo del Toro’s measured take on the famous Mary Shelley monster, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! with Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley debuted on Friday, March 6, to wildly polarizing reviews. While some critics like The AV Club’s Luke Hicks called it a “bold, beautiful, feminist freakout,” The celebrity.land’s Johnny Oleksinski wrote that it was “one of the worst movies I’ve seen in his job.” What gives?
The Bride! draws inspiration from the original 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, wherein the monster asks Dr. Frankenstein’s mentor to repeat the famous experiment and create a female companion for him. Gyllenhaal’s film, which loosely follows the plot of the 1935 film, setting the story in 1930s Chicago. The new film paints Frankenstein and his Bride, Ida, as a sort of Bonnie & Clyde crime couple, with Gyllenhaal stressing on press tours that she sought to reinterpret the Gothic story from the Bride’s point of view.
“I just had this fantasy,” Gyllenhaal told The LA Times. “I’m not speaking for Mary Shelley, but there must have been some other, naughtier, wilder, more dangerous things that Mary Shelley wanted to say that weren’t said in Frankenstein. What else might she have wanted to express?”
Still, it seems critics weren’t exactly vibing with her chain-smoking and gun-slinging recreations of Frankenstein.
In Alison Willmore’s review for Vulture, the film critic wrote that, “I have no idea what The Bride! is trying to say, but it sure is loud about it.” She also said that the “The Bride!’s feminism is ultimately more pussy hat than punk rock in nature… like something that didn’t have a consistent vision.”
Ouch.
“The whole thing is exhausting, at times wincingly self-indulgent, entirely heartfelt and yet also relatable, wrote The New York Times chief film critic Manohla Dargis, “perhaps especially for women who, when confronted with unrelenting monstrousness, need to give birth to their own monsters.”
Other critics didn’t even know how to feel, let alone articulate themselves.
“’Is it a ghost story, a horror story, or most frightening of all, a love story?’” David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter said was one of the lines from the film. “I sure couldn’t tell you.”
“The Bride! is more a film to feel than to explain,” Tomris Laffly wrote for RogerEbert.com. “It is a movie lover’s movie that disarmingly worships cinema, a cacophony of ideas (some invigorating, some half-realized) that playfully mines Mary Shelley’s gothic classic, a romantic turn-on, and a rightful feminine scream all in one.”
It sounds to me like Gyllenhaal really swung for the fences on this one, and you simply must hand it to her for trying. I’d way rather see twenty The Bride!’s swing and miss then another twenty Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Slops. Betting on big auteurs to make a fool of themselves on screen is what this business is all about, no? How else would Warner Bros. also give audiences Sinners and One Battle After Another last year if it didn’t take risks? So, even if The Bride! is more Joker Folie à Deux then Thelma & Louise, I say keep them coming.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.esquire.com ’
