Back in 2021 when everyone (well, a lot of people—not me!) was swooning over The Lost Daughter, no doubt one of the things they thought was, “Surely writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal will next make a film in which the Bride of Frankenstein and Mary Shelley tell knock-knock jokes to each other.” Everyone assumed that would happen, and so of course it does happen in Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (in theaters March 5), a blood-strewn Natural Born Bonnie & Clyde romance that fashions itself as a treatise on female rage. 

Mary Shelley, played by Jessie Buckley, opens the film, and Gyllenhaal has written and shot her like some kind of vengeful demon witch. There isn’t that much air between this Mary Shelley and the Weird Sisters in Joel Coen’s Macbeth. Shelley is dead, she tells us, felled by a brain tumor that destroyed her mind before it killed her. Now she is addled in some black-and-white otherplace, where she is cooking up an idea for a sequel—yes, Gyllenhaal has an embodiment of Mary Shelley say the word “sequel”—in order to . . . Well, it’s not really clear why this Shelley is so hellbent on freaking out the squares or whatever. I guess she is generally angry that she didn’t get to say her full piece before she died, but now Gyllenhaal has given her the opportunity to do that. 

Which she does by possessing the body of a drunken mob moll also played by Buckley. We meet this vessel, named Ida (or, at least, that’s the name Shelley gives her until the woman can find her own name herself [?]), drunk at a nightclub table with John Magaro and Matthew Maher, the latter of whom is forcing her to eat an oyster and otherwise demean herself. Suddenly, the ghost of Mary Shelley enters Ida’s body and she is thrashing on top of the table, slipping in and out of a British accent while these gangsters look on in anger. Before long she is dead, then she is revived by Frankenstein (Christian Bale) and the only vaguely mad scientist Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening, playing herself) and told that she is to be Frank’s bride. Every few minutes (or, sometimes, seconds) the Shelley persona slips out, forcing Buckley to yank herself back and forth between characters in a way that feels like old, vaguely offensive portrayals of mental illness. She tics and spasms, speaking in rapid, often rhyming word association, like the Genie from Aladdin or the old hobo soothsayer in Always doing La Bête.  

That is the groundwork for this turgid, bedeviling mess of a film, which keeps insisting it has some big idea but never coherently explains what that idea is. Well, okay, I guess when, toward the end of the film, the Bride adamantly says “me too” several times, we are able to grasp that Gyllenhaal is getting at something particular. As she is in a scene in which we find out that the Bride’s criminal antics have inspired women the nation over to dress up like her and commit their own liberatory misdeeds. She has become a feminist-anarchist icon, a manifestation of the collective fury born of centuries of oppression, violence, dismissal, and other mistreatment. 

The only trouble is, those women across America seem to have been inspired by one (1) confusingly articulated scene in which the Bride and Frank, as he’s called, do a dance to a remixed version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (like from Young Frankenstein) while Jake Gyllenhaal, playing a movie star with whom Frank is obsessed, watches on. That is the sociological crux point of the movie: a single dance sequence performed by two waiters from the Jekyll & Hyde Club, followed by some muddled monologuing from the Bride (which only we in the audience would half-understand; the people in the room would have exactly zero idea what she’s talking about). That is enough, in the film’s arithmetic, to start a revolution.