What Maggie Gyllenhaal has done in her reimaging of The Bride of Frankenstein is utterly deranged. And thank God.
No shade to brilliant director James Whale, whose 1935 Universal sequel The Bride of Frankenstein is both exhilarating and cheekily queer. But — as Gyllenhaal has repeated frequently on The Bride!’s press tour — his titular monstress never speaks a word in her few short minutes of screen time. Still, as that original Bride, Elsa Lanchester made this she-beast an instantly compelling marvel who has become truly iconic, an intoxicating mix of high femme and the horrific.
Gyllenhaal smartly pulls these stylistic elements into her Bride!, as her revived Bride coughs up black bile that stains her lips in a perfect Cupid’s bow, with a chic and unnerving stain creeping up her high cheekbones. Gyllenhaal also borrows from Whale the inspired choice to have her lead actress play both the Monster’s Mate (as Lanchester was originally credited) and the author who birthed her, Mary Shelley. However, far from the prim, giggling lady presented in The Bride of Frankenstein, Gyllenhaal’s Shelley (played by Hamnet Academy Award nominee Jessie Buckley) is a yowling spirit from beyond the grave who is thoroughly mad, in both senses of the word.
Presented in a suffocating black-and-white close-up, a heaving Mary Shelley introduces this story as the one she still wished to tell, even from the grave. Her rage of being silenced echoes across the ages, possessing a gangster’s moll in 1930s Chicago. And from there, Gyllenhaal weaves in references to Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, as well as Mel Brooks’ parody Young Frankenstein, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and Lizzie Borden’s 1983 dystopian classic, Born in Flames.
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