The Bride! Parent Guide

The ghost of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) has been slipping into madness in some dismal afterlife, until she spots the opportunity to sneak out and possess Ida (Jessie Buckley), a miserable young woman on the fringes of Chicago’s organized crime scene in the late 1930s. Unfortunately, Ida knows a little more than is good for her and soon winds up dead and buried in an unmarked grave.

Ida’s death is fortuitous for Frankenstein (Christian Bale) and mad scientist Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), who have been seeking a nice marriageable corpse for Frank. They reanimate Ida, but the process erases her memory and enhances her burgeoning madness, leading to hallucinations about Mary Shelley. In or out of her right mind, circumstances soon propel Ida and Frank on the run from cops, angry mobs, and everything in their pasts. What better way to find yourself than a criminal road trip with that special reanimated corpse in your life?

The Bride! is a little ungainly and it has a tendency to abruptly lurch between themes and tones: considering the film is about a pair of shambling, unstable, reanimated corpses, this actually works as a narrative element – sometimes. Other times, it makes the film feel confused, disjointed, and unpleasant. 

In return for the generally confusing vibe, the film presents some fascinating new contexts for familiar characters and ideas. The famous “Bride of Frankenstein” is reframed as the protagonist, expanding her characterization beyond her relationship to her titular man and exploring her experiences and motivations. Jessie Buckley is captivating, if bizarre, in her dual roles as “Mary Shelley” and The Bride and really carries the film through some of its stranger diversions. 

Parents looking for a remake of the classic Bride of Frankenstein are not looking in the right place here – this film lives in a bizarre wasteland somewhere between Poor Things and Joker: Folie a Deux, with all the utter madness that implies. There are frequent scenes of sexual content, violence, drinking, and a steady flow of profanity throughout. Hardly the stuff family films are made of.

Just like Frank, the film is made of messy, disparate components, and some of them work better than others. Zig-zagging between a Bonnie-and-Clyde-spree, a social revolution, and several choreographed dance numbers, the story never finds a steady pace or tone. I don’t think it’s going to have a huge appeal to fans of the book, but adults looking for an interesting reimagining of some of the ideas and the aesthetics of those classic Karloff movies need look no further.

About author

Keith Hawkes

Keith Hawkes graduated from Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada with a degree in English and History. His interests are movies, American literature, science fiction, almost every kind of music, and museums. He enjoys criticizing films for fun - although he's okay with being paid for it.