The Bride!

There is no question that Gyllenhaal packs her film with so many ideas that it can become dizzying. The themes sometimes pile up, the tonal shifts arrive quickly, and the story occasionally feels less like it’s unfolding than tangling itself into elaborate knots. Some viewers will likely bail when the plot begins tripping over its own ambitions. But the film also has an undeniable boldness. A willingness to be strange. To be excessive. To be gloriously weird.

The Bride! embodies an unconventional and rebellious nature that makes it wholly unique. Whether it's aware of its flaws or not, it's not ashamed to lean completely in. In many respects, The Bride! can come off as being just a little too much. Too much romance, too much theatricality, too much feminism — but sometimes, too much of a good thing is still a good thing.

Buckley is a powerhouse and Gyllenhaal's script is so bold and fresh that even when it doesn't work it pulls you in.

Veers off in so many exhausting directions that it ultimately amounts to little more than sound and fury. She’s alive, alive, but she can’t maintain this pace.

It’s a scrappy punk feminist tragicomedy of l’amour fou, a renegade take-off on the “Frankenstein” myth. And while the movie doesn’t quite work — it lumbers along and blows fuses; it has lots of flesh and blood but not enough storytelling spine — there’s a spark of audacity to it.

Fans of Maggie Gyllenhaal will be disappointed; fans of Mary Shelley will be disappointed; fans of unhinged cinema will be morbidly intrigued.

Leave her at the altar! She is “The Bride!,” one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job.

An epic production ... incredible performances by lead actors. The Bride! Is a brave blend of fable and reality... violence, gender roles and un requited love.

"The Bride!" is a bold but uneven gothic romance reimagined as a classic monster tale. The Bride! begins with resurrection, not merely of flesh but of imagination. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Gothic romance revisits the mythology of Bride of Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, transplanting the familiar story into the smoky jazz clubs and restless streets of 1930s Chicago. What emerges is a strange and often ridiculous reimagining that blends monster mythology, romance, with social rebellion that doesn't feel earned or well established about women’s agency in a patriarchal world. The film opens with the restless spirit of Mary Shelley, portrayed by Buckley, lamenting that her original literary creation remains incomplete. In death she still searches for inspiration. That quest leads her to Ida, a free spirited woman moving through Chicago’s nightlife as a moll tied to mob culture. During a chaotic night out, Shelley’s spirit seizes Ida’s body, altering her personality so dramatically that the people around her react with violence. A fall down a flight of stairs ends Ida’s life. Meanwhile, another wandering figure moves through the city’s shadows. Frank, played with wounded sincerity by Christian Bale, arrives seeking Dr. Euphronious, portrayed by Annette Bening. Created more than a century earlier, Frank’s request is simple. He wants a companion. He wants someone capable of loving him. Reluctantly, Dr. Euphronious agrees to help. Their grim search leads to a graveyard where Ida’s body is recovered and transformed through the familiar ritual of electricity and unnatural science. When the Bride awakens, she carries none of Ida’s past memories. Instead, she embodies a strange fusion of innocence and rebellion. Her first encounter with Frank is far from romantic. Confronted with his grotesque appearance, she bluntly tells him she prefers distance. (It doesn’t help that Mary Shelley is still banging about in her re-invigorated head.) Frank basically grants Ida a new lease on life, which she takes to with wild and somewhat reckless abandon, leading to her and Frank going on the run together. The most salient point that The Bride! strives to make concerns the structural social limits on women’s agency. The 1930s world that Gyllenhaal brings to the screen is a familiar one, where women are sidelined at best and brutalized at worst by men taking their liberties with them. It’s a world where Ida dancing in the middle of a nightclub invites groping, abusive hands, or a highly competent woman must play second fiddle to a criminally negligent lead detective (who also happens to be an accidental murderer). The active and passive diminishing of women exists in every frame, a thematic contrast to Gyllenhaal’s free-flowing, wildly idiosyncratic visual and tonal flourishes. She and cinematographer Lawrence Sher frequently experiment with color and scale, phantasmagoric imagery, and Old Hollywood references throughout the film. Ida’s deadly fall down the stairs is framed as a cosmic and spiritual transfer of one’s soul, hinting at her imminent rebirth. Her revival in Dr. Euphronious’s lab is a dazzling, explosive light show, speaking to the opportunities she will ostensibly have in her second life. The film’s most unhinged (and glorious) sequence has Frank and Ida turning a glitzy New York party into a “Thriller”-esque flash mob set to Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” At the film’s best, Gyllenhaal eschews convention and gleefully embraces the absurd, macabre foundations of the Frankenstein mythos, enveloping us in an atmosphere. However, time begins to soften the tension between them. Without the burden of memory, the Bride begins to discover the world anew. Frank, who finds joy in watching classic musicals starring entertainer Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), reveals a gentle fascination with performance and spectacle. Their bond slowly forms through shared curiosity rather than destiny. When Frank violently defends her from a pair of attackers, their connection transforms into something deeper. Soon the pair embark on a cross country odyssey, evading authorities while embracing a life defined by pleasure, freedom, and defiance. Meanwhile, the Bride’s increasingly flamboyant persona begins to inspire women who see her as a symbol of rebellion against restrictive expectations. What begins as a monster narrative evolves into a broader exploration of identity, liberation, and companionship. While its overarching theme is very compelling, The Bride! stumbles in the execution of the story itself. As Frank and Ida continue their crime spree, it becomes less clear what we’re supposed to make of their romance. Are they star-crossed lovers with a penchant for murder, or are they each other’s ruin? Their relationship may sit in a middle space, but Gyllenhaal doesn’t provide enough about them for us to say definitively.

I'm not the biggest fan of period movies, but I had to make an exception when Jessie Buckley is in the lead here. Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Bride! comes out just 3 months after another Frankenstein adaptation. But the Bride is not about the science but more about how women are ostracised from society. Frankenstein's monster, who now has lived for over 100 years, travels to Chicago to meet with Dr. Euphronious, whose help he needs to help to bring a woman back to life for **** Bride has a lot working in its favour. The credit for that goes primarily to Jessie Buckley. She turns in yet another memorable performance that is loud, reactive to the plight of women and polar opposite to the calmness that she brought to her role in Hamnet. Christian Bale plays an older version of the monster and I can picture Jacob Elordi's version turning into this version. He is the image of a person who is lonely and would go to any extent to get a companion. Jake Gyllenhaal doesn't have much to do as someone who serves as Frank's inspiration. Penelope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening costar.Maggie Gyllenhaal makes some notable changes to the narrative, the major one being the possession of The Bride by Mary Shelly's character. This brings out a different side to the character, one that is empowered and wants a safer place for women in the world. The Bonny & Clyde style of storytelling makes for a refreshing change. The Bride! isn't for everyone. It works primarily because of Buckley's performance and Gyllenhaal's vision for the character.

They HAD to hypersexualize it. They HAD to start the movie off with two drunken **** going at it. The choreography was good. I appreciated the artistic side to the dance and music numbers. What I’m really getting fed up with is every other movie starting off with a “bed scene” and expecting that to be a “catchy” opening. It started off typical, woke and stupid, and that really hindered what could have otherwise been a decent “modern” take an a very old story.

之前看的本片的各种预告，都让我做好了看一部《弗兰肯斯坦》或者是女性主义电影的准备，万万没想到居然是《小丑2》。但这部的表达还是太超前了，不太能欣赏得来。