THE BRIDE! ***
Maggie Gyllenhaal2025
IDEA: In 1930s Chicago, a murdered gangster's moll is resurrected to serve as a companion to Frankenstein's monster.
BLURB: That exclamation point is no mere stylization; The Bride! is an emphatic, immodest, unbridled shout of a film, a rowdy cinephilic pastiche that isn’t afraid to get goofy. This means a delectably unhinged Jessie Buckley swerving from brassy Chicago flapper girl to her best, burlesque Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich; Jake Gyllenhaal as a prim Fred Astaire-type Hollywood star; randomly, Penélope Cruz as a chain-smoking incipient detective named Myrna Malloy; and, but of course, a gaudy ball reprise of Young Frankenstein’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Maggie Gyllenhaal is as evidently drunk on movies as she is on a cathartic (if simplistic) brand of girlboss feminism, and her film’s unabashed embrace of camp is invigorating in a contemporary Hollywood so allergic to madcap fun. The Bride! also has a clear and mostly satisfying ideological point, which is to restore agency and bite to women whose representations have largely been dictated, and flattened, by men. By making Mary Shelley an actual character in her story, and one who speaks through her creation, the Bride, Gyllenhaal pays tribute to a fellow female auteur and shows how women creators through time can communicate with and build on each other’s legacies. Does everything work here? No; the feminist revolution sparked by the Bride feels like a dropped thread, and the mob/detective stuff is pretty sketchy, despite a scene-stealing performance from a ruthless Zlatko Burić. But The Bride! has style and verve to spare, as well as dozens of literal tongues figuratively planted firmly in cheek.
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