Maggie Gyllenhaal’s confident love letter to cinema and primal, feminist scream is a theatrical tour de force. That means it demands to be seen on the biggest and loudest screen possible—it’s the only hope of picking up everything going on because, wow, there’s a lot.

The spirit of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), with unfinished business, finds a vessel in Ida, a moll in mid-1930s Chicago (also Jessie Buckley). When possessed, Ida shouting off her mouth in a club leaves her lying dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs outside it, her neck twisted. 

This coincides with Frank (Christian Bale), the former Frankenstein’s monster, imploring Dr Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening) to create a bride for him after a century alone. Soon, Ida’s corpse is reanimated, without a memory, which Frank fills in: she’s his Bride. Frank’s love of film and Ida’s love of clubs collide in a night of violence with two men dead and the pair on the run. The criminal couple take a road trip around the country, pursued by Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz), and more than Mary Shelley’s manipulation is at play. 

The Bride! is a gleeful meta-mash, a willful pile-on of references, a film’s film. Astonishingly, at its core is a single message about empowering women. 

Who better as a subject for that than the blended Shelley and Bride? One, a literary giant, and the daughter of Mary Wolstonecraft, the other, very much a creation of a male-dominated early film industry. The Bride has origins in Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, but never made it to life—slaughtered before animation in the tussle between the male creator and creation. It’s on film that she came to life, but the incredible vision of Elsa Lanchester in 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein is short and sharp. Her scream at the appearance of the monster and the innovation of James Whale’s dual casting (Lanchester as Bride and Shelley) is the springboard for The Bride!. A huge swing at reclaiming this underserved creation: the reanimated woman.

Jessie Buckley is incredible. Emerging as this multi-faceted, multi-personality character at the same time she’s chasing awards in Hamnet is an extraordinary, undeniable eruption onto the top table of Hollywood. There’s no danger of The Bride! harming her Hamnet chances, either. She’s a wholly watchable, magnetic and unpredictable presence on screen from the off, even before she spits and stains her face with black ink—the evidence of her toxic resurrection and a badge of her voicelessness. 

Buckley’s character, or characters, are only the prominent tip of the iceberg. Supporting her is Benning’s gender-swapped mad scientist, and Cruz’s sharp but wholly suppressed Malloy. The layerings of male and female powerplay are impressive, and the Bride’s inspiration for copycat acolytes is what’s drawn with the zeitgeist of Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019), only here given the devastatingly polite and meaningful soundbite of “I’d rather not.” That said, the tonal wear and convoluted gaslighting plot circling the Bride may not hamper these performances, but they do weigh down the film. 

Of the non-acolytes, it’s Bale who’s quietly mesmerising as he gets his turn as the original creature. In there are shards of many screen creations, but it is also very much a monster of a film. It isn’t the erudite creation of Shelley’s book, but the 100-year-wise update of Karloff’s physically and verbally limited creature. Despite his power, rage and intense feeling, he’s the flip side of a weak coin to Sarsgaard’s woolly detective. Still, in his eternal naivety, there is the film’s most effective portrayal and exploration of the endless gaslighting Ida and the Bride are subjected to.

Mainly, The Bride! is a crime road trip, a structure that allows Gyllenhaal to throw everything at the screen, and if you’re fully along for the ride, it builds and builds. That, though, is risky for those not willing to commit to the brash opening. The staid cop twist that encircles the Bride is tame, and the bursts of controlled, encouraged insanity—the New York high-society party the pair gatecrash, subvert, dance and kill through is a great example—are consciously alienating. There’s little in The Bride! That’s compromised, but there are hints where this could have gone—a full-on Moulin Rouge-style assault on every sense, perhaps. 

But where The Bride! stops itself, some of its references to fray. It’s where it veers closer to its film roots that things really come unstuck. The beginning, with the chiaroscuro, monochrome Shelley talking directly to the audience from the afterlife, and the eruption of Ida’s possession are visceral moments suggesting what pure cinema can be. The scenes with Euphronius are stilted in dialogue that reductively satirises early Universal Pictures. It’s a shame that a film so bursting with life sinks with these heavy, unnecessary rolls of script. The callbacks to 1930s cinema and B-movies are fun, but an anchor on what The Bride might have been: A wholly sensory experience.