Maggie Gyllenhaal’s talk about Bride of Frankenstein is ‘delightful’ ★★★★☆

When Euphronious initiates the corpse, the Electrified Bride comes back to life with her platinum hair at the end, an echo of Elsa Lanchester’s hair in the original film. A renewed chemical left black spots on her face and she can’t remember the name of it. Buckley gives a fierce performance, but it takes a while to believe in the character of the Bride, not because she doesn’t know herself but because Gyllenhaal’s stylistic shifts keep us at a distance. For much of the film, the Bride is more an idea of ​​female empowerment than a character, and the presence of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, doesn’t help.

Shelley, also played by Buckley, opens the film with her black-and-white scenes. (Unlike the Hollywood musicals Frank watches, the rest of this stunning-looking film is colored with a vaguely noir feel.) She speaks with an ominous accent and decides to inhabit the body of an American mobster named Ida, before Ida is reborn as a bride. Since then, in a troubling turn, Shelley intermittently speaks through it in the author’s voice and British accent, rather than Ida’s. As the bride often says: “I’d rather not do that,” quoting Herman Melville’s character Bartleby, as the film makes clear. It makes sense for this reference to come from Gyllenhaal, but it’s surprising to hear from the tough-talking Ida.

But there is a turning point, and the film rises dramatically towards the end from there. In an exhilarating scene in an underground club, the bride dances wildly while Frank watches quietly from across the table. When two men attack her outside the club, violence erupts and they are forced to flee. Peter Sarsgaard has a functional role as the detective following them, and Penelope Cruz plays his secretary who has better detection skills than her boss. The bride also falls in love with Frank, who is kind and protective. His saving her from violence twice, just as she saved him from loneliness, adds a layer of equality to the film’s feminist message.

The film is huge in scale, as they arrive in the bright neon light of New York City’s Times Square, and later engage in a shootout with police on a dance floor. And all the time, even when you’re the bride! It lacks sentimentality, and its bold vision is exhilarating.

★★★★☆