Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I missed it, just like most of America.
Did I Like It: Listen, I’m just as obsessed with The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) as anybody you might find in the world. A remake is a fascinating idea, and it’s not like we haven’t been there before.
But, unfortunately, that’s where the film begins an ends: a fascinating idea. Nearly every inch of the mythology around the Frankenstein cultural mythology, everything from the fabled creation of the story by Mary Shelley, all the way through to Young Frankenstein (1974) and even rolling the end credits over Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash.” And there the film lies, less like a film and more like a charming conversation about the subject one might have at a party, less a thrilling a cinematic experience on its own right.
There are deeper problems than that, though. When the movie reaches beyond the Shelley of it all, things are strained even further. There’s a streak of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) in there. There’s more than a little bit of Joker (2019) and way more of Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) than should have been tapped. There’s also a problem that, entirely unintentionally, Poor Things (2023) offered its own revision of Bride before anyone on this film got to so much as typing. If a film inspires you to seek out the source material, that’s usually the sign of a pretty good, even great film. If a film makes you wish you had watched the films that inspired it, that’s far less satisfying. If a film makes you wish you had watched Joker instead (which would have inevitably made me wish I had watched Taxi Driver (1976) or The King of Comedy (1982), that’s something even less satisfying.