Unquiet Influences
On Maggie Gyllenhall’s The Bride! and being allowed to make ‘bad’ films
I wake and find myself haunted by Jessie Buckley’s Ida and by her Mary Shelley. Her aroma of oysters, spilt champagne, sweat, and burnt electrical wire. Some readers find Frankenstein to be a too discordant assembly of parts and plots, and certainly this will be the case with The Bride!, but within it there are kernels of brilliance. Ida (Buckley), a sex worker possessed by the unquiet spirit of Mary Shelley (also Buckley), as if she has been calling to her foremother with Lady Macbeth’s words ‘come you spirits who tend on mortal thoughts.’ This is where we begin, Ida is smart, but subject to the whims of men in 1930s Chicago. Enter Frank (Christian Bale), Frankenstein’s original, long-lived creature, who has sought out the outlaw genius Dr Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Benning) to make him a companion.
From Ida’s lovely corpse is born The Bride; witchy, ravenous, and hellbent on causing havoc. She and Frank soon become a monstrous Bonnie and Clyde, fleeing the authorities, crime bosses, and kick-starting a proto-punk movement for women who show their allegiance by carrying out baseball-bat vengeance in black lipstick. And in this sense, The Bride! fulfills Mary Shelley’s original threat; in the novel, Victor Frankenstein destroys the half-made female companion, fearing she will be “ten thousand times more malignant than her mate,” and that is just what you get with Buckley’s Bride.
There is a truly spectacular creation scene that somehow evokes James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, Rocky Horror, Poor Things and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. There is a nightclub sequence that features Fever Ray, with Frank imagining himself as a debonair dance partner to Ida. There are gruesome moments of vengeful death, and discomfiting exchanges between Ida and men who know they can use their power to take advantage of her. And through it all, you have Jessie Buckley glittering like a spooky, angry diamond. Mary Shelley erupts here, angry, thwarted, and it is her spirit that forms the brain attack at the heart of the story. Forget the detective subplot, which feels like a waste of time for Penelope Cruz and Peter Skarsgaard, tacked on to appease funders or studio execs who didn’t think people would ‘get it.’ The black lipstick is the point. It’s the point in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains! And it’s the point here too. This is a film that celebrates mess, the mess that is Frankenstein, and it urges you on to be disruptive in your life and in your creative choices.
As with Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, I am perfectly aware that The Bride! Is not a ‘good’ movie. But Fennell and Gyllenhall are both in fine company, as women with lauded directorial debuts (Promising Young Woman and The Lost Daughter, respectively) whose subsequent projects have included being handed something of a dog turd in taking on some form of classic adaptation. Jane Campion tanked with her Portrait of a Lady, and so it goes with The Bride!, which is like all Frankenstein adaptations in the sense that it is citational and referential to its innumerable screen predecessors, including Mary Shelley’s novel which is alternately claimed by both horror and science fiction as a foundational text.
But at the same time, I would often rather have an interesting mess then a pitch-perfect performance. Buckley has now received an Oscar for her role in Hamnet (Chloe Zhao 2025), an extremely worthy and well-received Shakespeare appropriation, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel which draws on aspects of Shakespeare’s life and work. She can now afford to do more wild shit like this, and I say, let it rip. Let women directors make bad films because other people get to do this all the time without destroying their careers. In the words given to Patti Smith in Just Kids, “If you see a door Patti Lee, just kick it in.”
