The Bride!

So, I've watched this twice in the cinema (within 3 days) and I'm not sure what approach I can take with writing this in order to best convince people to see without either gushing semi-nonsensically or self-righteously refuting the objectively incorrect things I've seen other reviews spout on about. Neither would be beneficial because, it is true that this is not going to be a film for everyone (though people would do well to keep in mind that no film is for everyone). This film, however, is for me and I loved it. First off, it seems prudent to mention that the notion of a bride for Frankenstein's creation (ie 'the monster') is, in fact, canon in Mary Shelley's source novel. While in the novel it is a relatively short sequence, it lays out the groundwork for 'The Bride!''s plot driver -- namely, the monster's (here named Frank) crushing loneliness. 'The Bride!' references this numerous times, both in directly in dialogue and visually in, for one example, Frank's ability to recite, line for line, all of the 1910-1920s musicals he sees, over and over, alone in the cinema. Shelley's story is also, obviously, the source for the 1935 'Bride of Frankenstein,' but there the title has a dual meaning, in that the film features brides for both Frankenstein and his creation -- 'The Bride!', however, while explicitly excluding a 'bride' for the doctor (here gender-flipped with Annette Benning's Cornelia Euphronious), it additionally goes to great lengths to add agency to the titular character's thoughts on marriage, claiming the pre-martial title of the Bride, and omitting the patriarchal 'of Frankenstein' appendage. Next, I've seen (and heard) comments about the film's reported 'lack of cohesion' and, to be frank, I utterly reject this. While 'The Bride!' does feature a variety of disparate genre tropes (musical, horror, detective story, gangster film, comedy, et al) which, taken in isolation may appear radically different or unrelated (or even 'unrelatable,' in the sense of them being impossible to combine), each is used here to further the film's ideas of self, society, and gender equality/parity as a whole. I'd hazard that if any those aspects were omitted (or scaled back much), the overall effect would have been lost. That the film fires off in seemingly different directions doesn't mean that the targets aren't hit; and just because there aren't many films that walk this kind of line doesn't, in and of itself, make any of them 'lesser' or, indeed, 'not cohesive.' Jessie Buckley really does give an astonishing performance here, but it's a different kind of performance than her role in 'Hamnet' (we is, as of this writing, seven days away from the Oscars where she is nominated). It's a very physical role, involving a lot of movement, including dance, but also a fair bit of contortion, particularly at the beginning and end. And as her character is, literally, possessed, it also requires a load of vocal gymnastics, flipping from a kind of gum-cracking '30s American ingenue to the craggy voice of a nearly 100 years dead English intellectual, often back and forth multiple times within single line reads. The fact that she is as convincing doing it as she is should be reason enough to see the film. Meanwhile, and as odd as it seems to say it, Christian Bale is much more restrained than his more typically kinetic style. Largely due to Frank's arc, he is initially withdrawn (albeit with explosions of uncontrolled violence) and only slowly ramping up his dynamism as Frank becomes more comfortable being with another person (compare his body language in the first meeting with Benning and then with Buckley in the Niagara Falls scenes). But it's a very, very calibrated performance and pretty impressive, if in a different way to Buckley, to watch. I could do this for the rest of the cast as well; Benning is wonderful, I love Jeannie Berlin's take on the film's Igor role (and her comedy delivery is great), and Sarsgaard & Cruz work remarkably well together, subverting much of the traditional gumshoe role while having a totally believable, if almost entirely unmentioned (deliberately so) backstory fueling their interactions. Look, like I said, there are going to be people who don't like this -- maybe it's too maximalist for them, too busy, too fizzing; maybe the intermittent violence will be too much of a turn off; maybe, maybe, maybe -- but please don't be the kind of person who decides to blow this film off just because you heard 'it's gotten poor reviews.' You'd only be robbing yourself of the opportunity to see a movie that truly refuses to be held back by 'convention' and actually aims for something greater. Go see it.