It took more than 50 years, but we've finally gotten a successor to Mel Brooks's "Young Frankenstein" that focuses on the Bride of F. There's even another formal-wear rendition of "Puttin' on the Ritz." The new parody is lurching and ungainly, though: Stitching parts of various things together seems to come easier to mad scientists than filmmakers.
The jokey yet outraged "The Bride!," which is written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is a semi-spoof of James Whale's 1935 sequel, "The Bride of Frankenstein," often called the greatest of all 1930s monster movies. I hedge with "semi" because, although it was pretty clear what Mr. Brooks was trying to do, Ms. Gyllenhaal's purpose is obscure.
A clunky framing device, filmed in black and white in an otherwise color picture and recurring throughout the film, features the spirit of "Frankenstein" author Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), who speaks to us from beyond the grave. Amid much vamping and cackling, she tells us that since her death she has been summoning her strength to the point that now, in 1936, she has gained the ability to control the mind of a woman named Ida (also played by Ms. Buckley), who is working undercover as a floozy for the police gathering evidence against a Chicago mobster. With Shelley remote-controlling her brain, Ida turns into a crazed party girl, dies falling down stairs, and goes to her grave. Temporarily.
Which makes her the perfect mate for a lonely bachelor monster. Christian Bale's Frankenstein, as he calls himself (no nonsense about him being merely Dr. Frankenstein's unnamed creature) is now 117 or so and desperate for a lady friend. He presents himself at the Chicago digs of an outcast physician, Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), who has been reanimating small dead animals. Could she help him satisfy his, er, carnal urges? He'll even dig up the grave of a suitable love match.
Ida, after getting a little jump-start in the Euphronious lab, returns to life as the unnamed mate for "Frank," as she calls him. Spitting up black phlegm and shouting out strings of word-association gibberish, Ms. Buckley quickly becomes the centerpiece of the movie, or rather its central headache. Her overacting meets Ms. Gyllenhaal's over-filmmaking like the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.
The director would like to be credited (wouldn't everyone?) with creating a punk-rock update of a classic. What she presents is more like the world's campiest cabaret act, with the Bride as a mashup of Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis and maybe Natasha Lyonne. Ms. Buckley, talking a mile a minute, flouncing through the sets, and switching accents like a Robin Williams standup routine minus the jokes, is meant to be the ultra-liberated spirit of Woman—a canny chaos agent who doesn't give a flying fig about patriarchal expectations. She even finds a reason to shout "Me too!" a couple of times. Since movie anti-heroines have often been like that for decades, though, it's like Ms. Gyllenhaal is expecting applause for being the 75th person to jump in the swimming pool in her evening clothes.
Leading Frank on a feminist killing spree and pursued by a pair of Chicago detectives (Ms. Gyllenhaal's husband, Peter Sarsgaard, and Penélope Cruz, who seem to think they're in a hardboiled noir instead of a nutty escapade), the Bride kicks off a "revolution," we're told, with cosplay fans dressed as her running amok to fire pistols randomly in the air, like so many Yosemite Sams.
The Bride (not Bride of Frankenstein -- that would be defining herself as his property) seems less like an edgy role model than a rampaging narcissist, one of those self-styled divas who insist they are shattering norms when they are really just making everyone in the room cringe. Every time she talks it's pure excruciation, and she never stops talking. Mr. Bale, formerly one of the leading actors of his generation, is reduced to spending most of the movie gawping at her antics.
Frank, who is obsessed with the period musicals of a Fred Astaire-style movie star (Ms. Gyllenhaal’s brother Jake), imagines putting on white tie to join in the elegant dance numbers. He randomly runs into the celebrated actor at a fancy cocktail party in New York, then gets everyone to join him for a group dance rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” styled like a 1980s music video.
It was funny when Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder did this in “Young Frankenstein” but here serves as a painful reminder that Ms. Gyllenhaal, whose only previous directorial effort was the sad 2021 Netflix drama “The Lost Daughter,” is unlikely ever to be listed alongside Mel Brooks among the comedy greats. Like Dr. F. himself, Ms. Gyllenhaal has unleashed a monster on unsuspecting countrymen. A witty theater owner would match the mood by selling torches and pitchforks at the concession stand.