Caught “The Bride” this weekend, and I loved it.
It's more than a reimagining (reinvention?) of The Bride of Frankenstein, that 1935 film that gave the Bride a whopping 5 minutes of screentime. This is a feminist fairy tale wrapped in Gothic/Noir stylings that is at once gloriously garish but also annoyingly tropey.
This Bride (Jessie Buckley) is a resurrected 1930s independent woman who pushed the men in her life too far and died violently as a result. Resurrected to be Frank's (Christian Bale) forever-bride, she still embraces life to the extreme, dragging him along on a dancing/ partying/ hallucination-fueled road trip that's as much Bonnie & Clyde as it is Universal Monster.
For all that I wanted to root for this Bride and her feminist manifesto, the journey was annoyingly restrained by modern filmmaking tropes. It doesn't pass The Bechdel Test (there are several women in the film, they do talk with each other, BUT when they do so it's about her relation to Frank), and for all the Bride's agency, she's frequently a damsel-in-distress who needs Frank to rescue her.
We *could* say there's a message there, that powerful women are still being restrained by modern society, but nothing else in the film seems to be pointing toward that deeper text.
Even so, "The Bride" is the monster movie I wanted when I was a kid, the one in which the monster embraces her true self and seeks to reinvent herself as someone outside society - a theme hinted at in the trailer when she casually says, "What's my name? I just can't remember."
If you love monster movies and/or strong women, definitely catch this in the theater.