The new film from Maggie Gyllenhaal uses familiar imagery and tropes, while abandoning the heart of Shelley’s classic.
A woman has never directed an adaptation of Frankenstein.
This is accurate in both the most literal sense (no woman has ever directed a feature film that is a direct adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel) and until very recently even in the sense of “Any movie that features Frankenstein’s monster as a main character.” The closest we got before only came last year, with Zelda Williams’ Lisa Frankenstein, which mostly uses the name as a pun but otherwise more or less is an entirely original creation.
That second qualification however is no longer true, because we have The Bride, the newest film from Maggie Gyllenhaal, which prominently features not only Frankenstein’s monster as second billed, but also Mary Shelley herself as a nebulous…supporting character? Narrator? Main character? It’s all very confusing. And we’ll get to it.
This is a bit surprising because, for all the things Frankenstein has been off and on over the years, it has always been understood by many to be a profoundly feminist text. It’s a book about creation, specifically the creation of life, and what price is paid when men, who cannot create life the way women can, meddle with the unknowable power of creation. It also deals fairly directly with ideas of how women are seen in society primarily as being companions for men, with little autonomy unto themselves. It is a rich text from many angles, but the feminist one has always been relegated to the background of most major adaptations.
It is easy to see that this is centrally on Gyllenhaal’s mind in the making of The Bride. For those who haven’t read the original novel in a while, the final act begins when the creature returns to his creator Victor Frankenstein and demands he make a female companion for him. Victor initially consents, but then gets freaked out by the idea of them having children, kills the female creature before it can be fully born, and essentially dooms himself to the coldest of revenges.
Later of course, James Whale made Bride of Frankenstein, potentially the high water mark for the Universal monster movie era. In that story (spoilers,) the Bride is created but immediately rejects the Creature, and he essentially says that if she won’t have them, none of them should exist. It’s a shockingly bleak and beautifully shot film, and draws from a lot of the themes in the book.
And now Gyllenhaal gives her interpretation, of both the original novel’s themes, the Whale films, of Mary Shelley’s own life, and even of other interpretations. She clearly has a deep well of appreciation for the Frankenstein mythos as an ever-morphing, always interpreted object, digging even some morsels to pick at from Mel Brooks’ intentionally silly Young Frankenstein. She has a deep love for Frankenstein as an idea that comes through in the film, similarly to how last year’s adaptation from del Toro operated as something of a love letter to the idea of Frankenstein as a concept more than the actual original source material.
The contrast is that Gyllenhaal mostly uses that frame, and then creates a hyperkinetic, busy anthem against sexual violence. Which is good in theory; sexual violence is obviously abhorent, and tackling it with vicious unflinching fury can be refreshing to see, especially when it does come from a female director. The problem with The Bride as a film is that her approach flattens the whole narrative, conflating the trauma and aggression that sexual violence illicits, and trying to tie that narrative back onto the original text.
The film opens with the assertion that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein on a dare (not entirely accurate; the fabled creation of the story took place as part of a contest, but close enough.) It then inserts the actual ghost of Mary Shelley (Jesse Buckley in shadows) into the narrative, informing the audience that she never quite got to the tell the story she wanted. She possesses the body of a 1930s sex worker named Ida (also Buckley, in fewer shadows), having her voice wildly swing between Chicago flapper and foul-mouthed English poet. Moments later Ida dies after a confrontation causes her to go falling down the stares.
Soon after, Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) shows up at the office of mad scientist Dr. Euphronius (Annette Benning). She is familiar with his creators work, and he demands that she make him a female companion. This reflects both the original novel and the Whale film’s structure, but that is where the comparison ends. Frank (as Euphronius helpfully nicknames him) soon has his Bride, but she has no memory of her previous life, and seems mostly interested in going to parties and causing a scene.
At a red district party, she is eventually assaulted, and Frank takes matters into his own hands and brutally murders her assailants. This kicks off the propulsive rest of the movie: Frank and the Bride (who he eventually gives the name Penelope) are on the run from the law, equal parts Bonnie and Clyde and Sid and Nancy. They like to go to movies, until they disrupt the scene and have to run on. They find a chaotic sense of peace with each other, but it is routinely disrupted by more and more moments of violence against them, many of which again include sexual assault.
On paper, this all sounds like a very punk rock good time, with flashes of evil that exist solely so they get smashed or shot by our heroes. And in the hands of Buckley and Bale, two of our finest living actors, you know you are due for some electrifying work. Bale has a great grip on how incredibly lonely it would be to a monstrosity of one, and Buckley’s keyed into the wild, discombobulated mind of a newly reborn corpse who also happens to have a dead poet from a different century rattling around in her brain.
In reality however, the rhythms of the movie get very repetitive very quickly, and eventually you are kind of waiting out to see what horrific thing will force them onwards. There is an interesting subplot about a gang of women who take the Bride as a model for violent revolution, and another about a pair of detectives that are tracking down our doomed lovers. But all of those stories more or less just fill time, with the main course being the joyride to hell between Frank and the Bride.
The end result is a chaotic mess, packed full of ideas and startling imagery that loses momentum about halfway through and never quite wins it back. The idea of Mary Shelley injecting herself into the story is interesting, but also paradoxically eliminates her own agency in the story that she originally wrote. Gyllenhaal, who wrote the script as well, clearly has a vision she is trying communicate that the Frankenstein we know isn’t really the full story. But the thrust of the story Gyllenhaal wants to tell (that the world is a violent, dangerous place for women in particular, and they need to grab their own autonomy by any means necessary) is so radically departed from the original text that it becomes difficult to pick apart what she is trying to say about Shelley’s own autonomy to tell her story in the first place.
It doesn’t help that the movie fluctuates between stark imagery of aggressive sexual assault to whimsical silliness with a sense of gleeful abandon. There are dance sequences that flow directly into political diatribes, and there is a lot of effective but jarring dark comedy that comes in sudden spurts. The final needle drop slides up on your as a threat, in such a way that you convince yourself they couldn’t possibly be doing what you think they are doing, only to just do the thing. (Even though it’s out there already I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say it’s a groaner)
I am painfully aware that my last two reviews are of films written and directed by female filmmakers that are adapting very loosely the work of 19th century female English authors that are both being released by Warner Bros. The difference is probably personal. As I confessed in my “Wuthering Heights” review, my familiarity with that source material can be boiled down to “read a synopsis,” but Frankenstein is my go-to answer for the best novel ever written. This probably why I found “Wuthering Heights” to be a fascinating reimagining that operates as its own piece, and I find The Bride! to be a headache inducing misfire.
Am I being petty that The Bride claims to be a deepening of Shelley’s original work, but then offers a very surface-level, abrasive condemnation of social violence against women? Perhaps. More than likely. But that is the bar the film itself sets, not one I am arbitrarily giving it. By having Shelley tell the viewer directly, this is the real story I would have told if I could have, it asks you to accept that the real message of Frankenstein is sillier, more misanthropic and lacking any sense of subtlety at its heart. It takes a morally ambiguous tale of the danger of men’s vanity and creates an original sequel that has all the nuance of a sledgehammer across the temple.
A woman has never directed an adaptation of Frankenstein. And they still haven’t. Because despite the clear admiration Gyllenhaal has for all things Frank, she also has made her own shambling recreation, something made in her own image that she attaches to Shelley’s, that shambles around until it lurks back into the darkness.
Maybe some day.
