Jessie Buckley is on her way to becoming a genre in herself. She is an actress, she is Agnes (from Hamnet), and now she is Ida, Penelope, or simply the bride, Frankenstein's bride. But above all, she is a creature with a nasal voice, well-aligned fangs, and a crooked smile that devours screens. Her diet only allows raw food with the center of the bite soaked in blood. When she appears, everything around her undergoes a slight blur: comedy takes on the acidity of tragedy, drama unravels into pathos (or even mystery), and tension vibrates like the emotions, surprise, or fear. Jessie Buckley is not only the protagonist of Maggie Gyllenhaal's new and very surprising — for better, for worse, and everything in between — film, she is also its victim, the offering sacrificed in a wild, messy, and very happy celebration of confusion. Jessie Buckley, indeed, is the bride, or The Bride! (as the title says), or simply, the chaos.
On the monument of 'camp' air that calls to horror as much as to pathos signed by James Whale in 1935, the directorial debutante with The Lost Daughter now proposes a wild tour de force (as the strong French say) as ambitious as it is, if you will, unconscious. The idea is not so much to rewrite or adapt anything as it is to directly desecrate the sacred tomb of what sterile manuals call the History of Cinema. From the first to the last frame, free of prejudices, the film sets out to push the limits of its own existence and its unbridled arrogance. The adjectives 'messy' or 'chaotic' seem insufficient for a proposal that at times is a musical comedy, at times a wild and romantic melodrama, at times a metacinema liturgy that summons everyone from a Fred Astaire emulating figure to Mary Shelley herself, sometimes a parody of gangster films (and horror, of course), and in the end, also a feminist manifesto. It allows everything, risks everything, and emerges with wounds from everything, but always from a fundamentally happy conception of cinema, happy in its ability to create images, stir bodies, and destroy icons. Furthermore, as already mentioned, the officiant of this bacchanal being Jessie Buckley is essential.
The Bride! tells the improbable love story of two dead people. They are not zombies, they are resurrected, which, although similar, is not the same. The first, the man, the more well-known of the couple, wanders through the night of time since he was delivered to the cruelest of lives in the most absolute solitude. And so it goes until he ventures a plan. With the invaluable help of the doctor played by Annette Bening, the Frankenstein brought to life by an unrestrained Christian Bale with a jester's expression dreams of awakening a female partner from the darkness. It is understood, therefore, that the creature in question is heterosexual. When this happens, both will come face to face with a life that is essentially unjust, cruel, and, who would have thought, undesirable; undesirable for anyone in general and much less for two monsters, which they are. If you add to that the fact that they are poor, somewhat ugly, and one of them a woman, the inconveniences multiply.
What follows is what always follows in the first science fiction story in literature in the strict sense; that is, a pursuit. Or, rather, several pursuits. All of humanity behind the monsters and the monsters behind, precisely, their lost humanity, which is also their love, their eternal love by force. But since it is about her, the bride, now the search also has to do with her condition as an exploited woman in a world of, indeed, men. Mafia men, policemen, abusers, and detectives. More things happen and indeed, a stylish and majestic (as always) Penelope Cruz appears as the smartest, most astute, and empathetic of investigators. In fact, from the very first second, everything keeps happening in what is and wants to be a farce with the soul of a pastiche to the dismay of the good people. The only thing that is cringe-worthy, to say it all, is that deliberate reference or not-so-accidental similarity to Joker. It is forgiven, but not liked.
And in the midst of it all, as mentioned, is Jessie Buckley, an actress who truly is a cinematic genre.
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal. Cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Penelope Cruz. Duration: 126 minutes. Nationality: United States.