Lisa Johnson Mandell’s The Bride! review celebrates the film’s brash, nourish, original take on the Mary Shelley tale and the themes that are applicable today.

I walked into The Bride! with cautious optimism and staggered out with the assertion that writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, who gave us the exquisitely disquieting The Lost Daughter, has now come up with something entirely different: a sprawling, glittering, magnificently deranged feminist fever dream stitched together from equal parts monster movie mythology, 1930s gangster noir and Mary Shelley’s intriguingly perceived spirit.

The premise will be familiar to anyone who’s ever shuddered at James Whale’s classic 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, but Gyllenhaal has done something audacious with the material. The film is set in a gorgeously rendered 1930s Chicago — all amber streetlights, jazz-soaked speakeasies, and the ever-present threat of mob violence.

It opens with a framing device of elegance and originality: Frankenstein author Mary Shelley herself (played by the incandescent Jessie Buckley, who is currently a justifiably getting consummate Oscar attention), speaking from the dark underworld she’s inhabiting. She has another tale to tell, and she’ll do it by possessing a gangster gun mol named Ida (also played by Buckley).

The author and her creation seem to be one and the same — both are women shaped, and defined by men who never fully reckoned with what they had unleashed.

The Bride! review — She’s alive!

The story follows The Bride as she is given life by the magnificent, deliriously committed Annette Bening playing Dr. Euphronia. She’s a fabulous mad scientist who crackles with electricity both literal and figurative. Euphronia is no mere lab-coated villain; she is a woman who has weaponized the very scientific establishment that tried to shut her out, and Bening plays her with elan.

Frank (Christian Bale) is a creature who is lonely, heartsick and desperate. He has never in his patchwork existence found someone to truly love. He convinces Dr. Euphronia to dig up a corpse and bring her back to life, declaring he will accept and cherish whatever results from the reinvigoration.

When Frank and The Bride circle each other, it is less a love story than a negotiation, two uncanny beings deciding whether they can afford to trust.The Bride, cuttingly erudite and terrifyingly alive, must navigate a world that wants to own her, control her, study her, or destroy her.

They begin clumsily and brutally, but in some ways, elegantly making their way through the world together, and can’t help draw the attention of the police, as well as the media.

Hot on their tails in story’s noir underworld is a detective duo played by Peter Sarsgaard (Gyllenhaal’s real-life husband)  and the blazingly charismatic Penélope Cruz. Their chemistry, both adversarial and electric, is a screwball-tinged procedural.

Jake Gyllenhaal, the director’s brother, appears as a preening silver-screen idol whose vanity serves as a wicked commentary on celebrity and masculine performance — Gyllenhaal clearly had enormous fun casting the people she knows best in roles that seem to gently rib their real-world personas.

The Bride! review — Many layered

What makes The Bride! most remarkable, however, is its layers. On the surface, it is a period piece of tremendous visual opulence — the production design and costuming are award-worthy achievements that lovingly evoke the shadow-soaked aesthetic of Universal monster movies, while injecting a punk-couture energy that feels wholly contemporary.

Peel back one layer, and it is a mob movie, complete with Tommy guns, smoky backroom deals, and corrupt power structures that would not be out of place in Scarface or The Public Enemy.

But at its core, The Bride! is a feminist text as bold and explicit as any produced by mainstream Hollywood in recent memory.

Gyllenhaal is not subtle about her intentions. The phrase “Me Too” is spoken aloud at a key moment in the film — not as a hashtag or a cultural reference, but as a declaration, two words uttered by The Bride with such quiet, earthquake-still conviction. It lands not as a slogan but as a verdict.

Similarly, a reworked Benjamin Franklin quote — “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God,”  is repurposed from its historical context into something that feels startlingly, personally feminist. When The Bride first reads it, chalked onto a wall in an alley where women have gathered in secret, it functions as both permission and prophecy. By the third time it appears it has become a battle cry.

But for all its serious-minded feminism, The Bride! is also great fun, making gleeful nods to similar films. Young Frankenstein is brought to mind with a show-stopping “Puttin’ on the Ritz” production number. The film’s wilder third act, when the band is on the run, so to speak, brings to mind the doomed romantic violence of Bonnie and Clyde and the anarchic, media-saturated nihilism of Natural Born Killers.

Audiences will also recognize inspiration from Joker: Folie à Deux,  and the recent Harley Quinn films. And just for fun, over the end credits, with divine, unrepentant camp, “Monster Mash” plays, sending the audience home with a smile.

Is it flawless? No—nothing ever is. There are sequences that feel like a feminist horror mood board — images and ideas pinned haphazardly together. The middle act sags in a few places beneath the weight of its own ambition. Not every splatter lands as a brushstroke.

You might want to look at The Bride! as a cinematic Rorschach test, an analogy made beautifully literal the black, ink-like chemicals that splotch from the corner of The Bride’s mouth. What you take from this film may reveal something interesting about you.

What The Bride! refuses to be is forgettable. It dazzles, it incites, it even amuses — but most of all, it entertains with thefearless, slightly reckless energy of a filmmaker who has decided she has something to say and is going to say it in the most vivid, alive, and wonderfully monstrous way she can imagine.

I think Mary Shelley would have approved.

Rated: R

2 Hours 6 Minutes

If this The Bride! review encourages you to lumber over to the cineplex and catch a screening, get times and tickets on Fandango.com.

Lisa Johnson Mandell’s The Bride! review celebrates the film’s brash, nourish, original take on the Mary Shelley tale and the themes that are applicable today.