The Bride! review: Jessie Buckley delivers vivid performance amid scattergun storytelling
Jessie Buckley in The Bride!
(15A) stars Jessie Buckley as Ida, a good-time girl in 1930s Chicago who is bumped off by a mobster and reanimated when Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) demands that Dr Euphronious (Annette Benning) create him a mate.
Unaware of her resurrection, and now possessed by the vindictive spirit of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, Ida embarks on a chaotic spree of chaos, carnage and murder.
Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Bride! is a series of vivid set-pieces loosely connected by a jumbled plot that tosses out intriguing ideas (issues of consent, questions of identity, fleeting references to #metoo) but never pauses to consider their consequences.
It’s a neo-Gothic Bonnie and Clyde, broadly speaking, but while Buckley delivers a vividly wrought Ida / Bride, and Christian Bale is gruffly tender as the lumbering monster driven by ‘the agony of loneliness’, the storytelling is too scattergun, and the characters too intrinsically absurd, to allow the audience to connect emotionally with the doomed lovers’ plight.
- theatrical release
