As you may remember if you are diligently following the personal promises I make to myself (and I know that you are), I said at least twice on this blog in the past that I would be diving into Jessie Buckley's filmography, cannonball style. Big splash. Well, I recently ticked off another Big Buckle (this is what I shall be calling all Buckley movies henceforth), and it has shaken me to my core.
 |
| Me in the club. They're playing Caramelldansen. |
The Bride (2026) is a movie about the messed up, crazy, wacky bride of Frankenstein, and reader, I hated it with a passion.
Not ten seconds into this unsubtle assault on the senses, we hear from the wordsmith herself, Mary Shelley, played by Buckley in a dark room in a sort of ghostly drunken stupor. THIS Mary Shelley is nasty. This Mary Shelley says 'fuck' and 'cunt' and stuff like that. Whoa. This Mary Shelley cackles madly and speaks in a disoriented jumble like she's reading from randomised loose pages of a thesaurus. And all of this is performed with such a total lack of subtlety that I felt myself reach my maximum cringe level within about ten seconds of this movie's start.
From there, we meet the 1920s stinker also played by Buckley who will be simultaneously re-animated and half-possessed by the spirit of Shelley. I'm not totally sure what the throughline is on this - the movie concerns itself with a really on-the-nose and oddly empty feminist-ish commentary, and clearly has some interest in the warping of a woman's life (and work) post-death, when she can no longer speak or have any impact on her own image.
Mary Shelley is freakishly combined with a contemporaneous woman brought back to life in service of her own creative entity (the monster, played by Christian Bale), and so this body is inhabited in a dream-like, crazed oscillation between lucidity and anger and raving lunacy. Where does the original woman, and Mary Shelley, and the strange combined product made of their combination begin and end?
Within this story that seems on its face to want to cast a murky negative light on the use and reconstitution of women both in actual violent terms and in rhetorical and historical terms, we treat the monster himself as a sort of dim, kind soul. He has been created to need, and how cruel is that? And yet, he must replicate himself, and isn't that worse?
The movie seems to have one foot in the idea of characterising the monster as a continuation of a broad patriarchal reconstitution of women into whatever convenient form men see fit, and the other firmly planted in a freaky monster Bonny and Clyde fun romp.
Each undermines the other.
 |
| #CoupleGoals |
To some extent I enjoyed the visuals. There's some cool shots, and I especially enjoyed the black and white scenes for the irritating interstitial moments where Mary Shelley speaks directly to the audience but has nothing of interest to say. I did, however, find the flashiness a bit grating.
Where Yorgos Lanthimos can really excel at the use of some quite jarring aspect ratio and colour grading changes (I'm thinking of Bugonia, where it was so perfectly done, very considered and unintrusive, extremely effective, and even shocking), the visual assault here felt fatiguing. I felt like I was the wall, and the movie's scenes were spaghetti being thrown at me.
Stop it. No more. Don't go to the club and dance crazy to the strobe light. I'm begging you.
For some reason there's an extremely thin and lightly explored detective story going on in this movie, too. Penélope Cruz is here, and she's trying to do detective stuff. But, oh my God, she's a woman. Women can't do detective type stuff, can they? This is just so tiresome. I don't know why it's here. It feels like something out of a cartoon.
The commentary on women and women's literature, and whatever analogues there are between the 1920s and now, and on the concept of stuffing a woman into a mould to serve as counterpart to a man, etc, just all felt so flat and nonsensical. I usually love to see a woman going apeshit and screaming and attacking men and spitting or whatever. I mean, I liked Men (2022). But this was painful. It was like if they took Joker 2 and hammered it down into a less incisive, less creatively bold movie.
At least there, even if the movie botched it in the last thirty minutes (do not get me started), the constant re-framing of Arthur Dent/Joker's image, the way he's seen by different people and different groups, the way he comes to represent certain agendas and fantasies and convenient images, and his own struggle to cope with, adhere to, and use those to his own advantage, is explored quite vigorously and profoundly.
Whatever. I'll stop glazing Joker 2 now. I hated this movie deeply. Thanks for hearing me out.
One Christian Bale head staple out of five.
★☆☆☆☆