Courtney Howard // Film Critic
Even if you haven’t seen James Whale’s 1935 horror film, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, you’re probably still vaguely familiar with the titular character’s origin story. She was created out of an immortal creature’s desire for love and accompaniment – and, because she rejects the monster as her betrothed, she doesn’t get stick around for too long. Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal has now reimagined the tale with THE BRIDE!, delivering what looks to be a galvanizing feature centered on female agency and identity.
In the film, Frankenstein (Christian Bale) travels to Chicago in 1936, requesting that pioneering scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) create a companion for him. A Bonnie to his Clyde, if you will. They bring a dead woman (Jessie Buckley) back to life – and the consequences are innumerable and unpredictable, especially for her given she can’t remember her former life. Havoc and hijinks ensue!
Holy Hell! We are RSVP’ing “Yes” to this brilliant, beautiful visionary period piece. Setting the trailer to Florence + the Machine’s album opening banger, “Everybody Scream” feels like a feminist pronouncement that our new cinematic anthem has arrived.
At the film’s recent global, virtual trailer release event, Gyllenhaal shared a few details with us journalists about the making of and what to expect from this version of the titular heroine in a film the actress-turned-auteur promises will be “big and hot.”
Gyllenhaal’s THE BRIDE! was inspired by a tattoo!
Yes, you read that correctly. Gyllenhaal was at a party and saw a guest’s tattoo of the Bride of Frankenstein on his entire forearm. “It just hooked me. Here’s this movie called BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, which is really not in any way about the Bride of Frankenstein, and yet Elsa Lanchester makes this impact, even though she’s in the movie for three minutes and doesn’t speak. She just has this formidable power.” This kismet sighting caused her to think deeper about the characters in that film, from Frankenstein’s dichotomy being both lonely and a monster. “At the same time, what about the mate?” she continued. “He’s asking to have someone brought back from the dead to be his girlfriend. What about her? And that’s what this movie really gets into – what if she comes back and she has her own needs and her own agenda and her own wants and her own terrors.”
THE BRIDE! centers the female point of view!
Gyllenhaal said of Buckley’s character, “There are a few things that were on my mind when I was making her and writing her and then watching Jessie interpret her. She plays somebody who, in her life, was not able to get herself expressed before she dies – someone who had her mouth shut. And so she comes back as someone with a lot to say, and I think that there are a lot of people in the world that I imagine, myself included, which is part of why I made this, that can relate to that feeling.” She shared further, “The Bride comes back to life not knowing who she is and without any point of reference, without any compass to figure out who she is. So what does she need? What is her agenda? Part of it is just to figure out who she is now. There’s been so many movies, so much literature, so much written, made, thought about with men in that position. Who am I? Who am I, really? And so that’s another real motivation for her, is who am I?”
THE BRIDE! is absolutely punk in every sense of the word!
As glimpsed in the trailer, Gyllenhaal grounds bold visuals with a dynamic feminine pathos as the driving force. Jessie Buckley has labelled it, “proper punk” – something Gyllenhaal echoes in her response to my question if she thinks similarly. “I do think the movie is punk, yeah. But is punk just a celebration of something that doesn’t fit easily into a box? Then yeah, the movie’s totally punk. I remember when I first started working with Christian [Bale], he started sending me images and even videos of Sid Vicious. That’s what you just classically call punk. So there is just an aspect of straight-up punk in the movie. I loved that he was thinking that way.” She continued. “There’s a whole new other kind of punk, in fact, making this movie where The Bride of Frankenstein is the center. Friends of mine say, ‘Oh yeah, you made FRANKENSTEIN.’ And I say, as gently and nicely as I can, ‘No, I didn’t. I made THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.’ I think even that, in some way, has a punk aspect to it.”
Later, Gyllenhaal was asked what punk song best fits this film, she answered, “Siouxsie And The Banshees cover of Iggy Pop’s ‘The Passenger,’ both because just vibe-wise, I think it fits right in with the movie and also she’s – The Bride, The Bride of Frankenstein – presented as the passenger when that is absolutely not what she is. She’s driving this story.”
THE BRIDE!’s gothic-neo noir style pulls inspiration from a variety of films!
She stated, “I was interested in subverting a classic movie style. So yes, BONNIE AND CLYDE and BADLANDS and even METROPOLIS. I think about a movie like WILD AT HEART that does subvert those classic movie things in a David Lynch way, which is different than my way. Stylistically, I just let my mind open up and roam.”
As for the character’s personal aesthetic, Gyllenhaal explained it was a collaborative effort from many departments to nail her unique look. “It’s my mind, my ideas, mixed with Jessie’s, mixed with our makeup artist, Nadia Stacey. We let it emerge. I think first of all, there is this black, un-nameable, inky tar stuff that is part of the formula that brings [her] back to life. I love the visual of that and the aspect of that. Our incredible production designer, Karen Murphy, designed Euphronios’s lab. I love the femininity of that lab. It’s gorgeous, but there’s this chandelier full of almost test tubes that are full of this black that comes down these thick plastic wires and go straight into her arm. So as we were imagining and building all of that, we were like, well, ‘What’s the result of that? How could it stain her skin? In what way could it stain her skin that would be graphic, that would be gorgeous, that would appeal to us both from a makeup standpoint, a style standpoint and a story standpoint? That’s what we did.”
THE BRIDE!’s commentary on parasocial relationships informed the 1936 setting!
She elaborated, “As I was writing, I realized Frankenstein’s so lonely. His primary relationship is – before we meet him – with a movie star, because a movie star is someone you can imagine you have a relationship with and they don’t know you at all. Also Frankenstein, whose face is so scary and who people run screaming when they see him, he’s safe in the dark.” She elucidated further, “I thought it’s got to be set in a time when there are movies – and I chose the ‘30s because I love it aesthetically, and the movies are so fantasy. A lot of [this] movie is about the difference between fantasy, fantasy love, fantasy looks, fantasy sex, fantasy everything, fantasy versus reality, and what is the real pleasure of a love affair that’s based in reality.”
THE BRIDE! incorporates IMAX into the storytelling!
Gyllenhaal explained that, while she initially didn’t know much about IMAX films before tackling her own project, she figured out a way to utilize it within the narrative in order for it to make sense in the characters’ world.
“Larry [Sher], my cinematographer, started to speak to me about it before we started shooting, or even really started thinking about the visuals in the movie. Larry and I started to then imagine our own use of IMAX and the purpose for it. My question was, ‘Why grow vertically? What’s the emotional reason?’ In my film, I started out with the idea that we would grow when we moved into someone’s mind. The movie has a lot of magic in it because we’re bringing people back to life. It’s a mythological concept. So when we went into someone’s dream life, when we go into someone’s mind, when we hit the magic, we would grow.
It was particularly interesting because we shot anamorphically. On anamorphic, you can only have our native 2:39 aspect ratio. We had to choose beforehand when we would shoot on spherical lenses because on spherical lenses, we could grow vertically. What I wanted to do is I hadn’t seen, and I went to IMAX and asked… I wanted to know what would happen if you grew it, if you animated it. What they told me, which I thought was amazing, is that it hasn’t been done like this before, in the way that we animate it. By coming at it as a real beginner, by going, ‘Okay, I don’t know about this and I’m going to learn about it,’ my imagining of what IMAX could offer ended up being something that has never been done before.”
THE BRIDE! is a real family affair!
In addition to Buckley and Bale, the supporting cast is filled with incredible actors. Gyllenhaal gave them lots of praise. “I love my actors. There was an ease to casting Penelope Cruz. I’d never seen her do anything like this. She’s like sometimes in a screwball comedy and sometimes in the realest, most contemporary scenes. There was a real ease in putting that together and asking her. Same with Annette [Bening]. She’s brilliant. She’s [playing] an iconoclastic, brilliant, mad scientist.”
She enthusiastically continued: “Let’s talk about the people I know: My husband and my brother. I just knew I wanted Wiles to be super, super hot, so I had to ask my own husband [Peter Sarsgaard]. I think Wiles is a character who’s done some dark things and is also a hero. I thought Peter’s really good at that. With my brother [Jake Gyllenhaal], he was one of the very, very last people I asked. He plays a character who is a matinee idol in movies. In order to create those old movies that he’s in that are sometimes within the movie, it was a lot of work for him. I asked him at the very last minute because I wanted to make sure it was the right for our relationship. I haven’t worked with him since DONNIE DARKO. It was such a pleasure working with my brother. I would find myself laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my face. I loved it. It is true for all my actors, but of course there’s a special something with my own brother.”
THE BRIDE! is a love story!
Gyllenhaal described her film as such, saying, “I think the movie is a deep, deep love story about a very imperfect connection. If we’re honest, that’s every love story. Maybe that’s another one of the things that I thought I might really tell the truth about this. Is it going to resonate? Is it going to hit a vein? Love is a very complicated thing, with ecstasy, pleasure and also darkness and things that are broken.”
THE BRIDE! opens in theaters and IMAXⓇ in North America on March 6, and internationally beginning March 4.
