Penelope Cruz from G-Force!
Jessie Buckley is given a great canvas to perform and she absolutely drives the film. She’s incoherent at times, but that reflects the mania of the character. However, the film as a whole doesn’t do a great job at helping the viewer understand the context for most of what is said.
I think in a film driven by a character with a split personality we need more time to get to know each side before they are meshed together. It would make it easier to understand what aspects of each personality are on display at any given moment. Buckley uses two different accents, but there are also moments where, in Ida’s voice, she is being persuaded by Mary and the line becomes more and more muddled. That would be totally fine, if not in fact the entire point of the film, but because we don’t truly know the intricacies of each character, it leads to a series of puzzling monologues smattered throughout the film.
A brilliant example of the issue with this film can be seen through the New York arc. It starts with a scene in a park where Frank gets into a pond to collect coins, it does a great job showing his familiarity with this vagabond lifestyle and really endears the pair to the viewer. Moments later, they’re being chased with pitchforks by an angry mob and narrowly escape. At this point, I was really enjoying the direction the movie was taking. Then, after sneaking into an exclusive party and moonlighting as service staff, Frank meets his idol played by Jake Gyllenhaal. After being rejected, combined with the two previous scenes, it feels like the pair have reached rock bottom. Then for some reason, Frank, the Bride, and a smattering of random patrons break out into a Charlestonian flash mob. The tone completely changes for a musical number that I’m still unsure what purpose it served (also, by Jake and other characters not joining in or acknowledging the dance, it makes it very hard to understand the tension in the room for the next scene).
but their purpose here feels disconnected.
THEN the Bride breaks out into a monologue about silenced female voices that at this point in the film we really have no context for? At this stage, the film has consistently painted the pair as monsters in that world, so one has to ask: as this raging monologue builds and she waves a gun at multiple police officers, why isn’t she shot? In fact, the trigger discipline in this film is astounding from the police and also goes completely against the vilification of the Bonnie and Clyde duo of Frankenstein and his bride. As she shoots a police officer and they easily run away unharmed, I realised this film is not for me.
What of the many Joker comparisons? In both films, it just doesn’t feel entirely justified that these characters can mobilise a revolutionary movement. Especially in The Bride! when it spawns from a speech in a room with maybe a hundred people. At least in Joker, it’s on TV and on a show that we have context for being extremely popular. I think the movement is also fueled by surrounding press, but then the detective alludes to the fact that the Bride is being blamed for the 16 homicides of the female victims of this ongoing mob case, so I’m not sure how that would then fit into this revolution she is somehow the face of.
To be frank, I’m simply not arsed to document every plot point I have an issue with. Some are below, but I would love to be able to interview Maggie and ask a million questions.
Why did Penelope Cruz’s character let them be reanimated? They killed multiple police officers. This is a genuine head-scratcher. Myrna Malloy spends the entire film hunting them, then suddenly, after the Bride is gunned down, she orders the police to clear the room and tells Dr. Euphronius, “Take as long as you need”. How could that end well for her? Oh, the first case as detective and you allow the main suspects who killed a police officer in front of hundreds to escape? It completely undermines the stakes of the full investigation.
What the fuck was the doctor talking about at the end? Dr. Euphronius mentions at the end that her first human test subject was her own late husband. She brought him back, but “he came back wrong” he had no memory of her, was erratic and dangerous, so she “put him down”. This is dropped with almost no setup and is meant to explain why memory loss might happen again, but it arrives so late that it feels like exposition dumping.
No cogent reason for Ida being possessed by Mary Shelley, at least within the confines of the movie. This is the film’s biggest structural flaw. The opening suggests Mary Shelley is writing a sequel and then… possesses Ida? It’s often hard to know what’s real and why it might be in The Bride’s mind". The influence Mary has, why she picks Ida, what rules govern the possession, whether she leaves at the end—is all left nebulous.
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