“THE BRIDE!” (quotation marks co-sign the exclamation point’s insistence that this is not the same as THE BRIDE starring Sting) is a wild and incoherent movie, both for good and bad, and not really in the ways I expected. The trailers suggested a stylized rock musical sort of approach, but they did that by emphasizing the occasional stylistic diversions (a dance fantasy, a James Whale homage). For the most part the world of the movie is more normal and literal than that, grounding the absurd premise “What if the monster and bride of Frankenstein were alive in the thirties and sort of turned into Bonnie and Clyde?” So you got these two heightened monster characters interacting with mobsters and getting chased by cops and regular stuff like that.
In the opening seconds we learn that it’s way more convoluted than the trailer conveyed, with a concept I’m not sure even the full movie gets across with clarity. You see, Academy Award winner Jessie Buckley (MEN) plays Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, famed author of Kenneth Branagh’s version of Frankenstein. Her soul is trapped in some sort of purgatory where she says she’s been for centuries (though the movie is set in 1936, which is 85 years after Shelley’s death). She says that Frankenstein “wasn’t the half of it. What I wanted to write…what I needed to say, I couldn’t.” Whatever great story she had in mind she never got to put on paper because of a brain tumor, so she possesses a lady in Chicago named Ida (Jessie Buckley, JUDY), sometimes but not most of the time speaks through her, and… somehow causes her to live out her life as that unwritten story? Pretty ballsy of writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal (THE LOST DAUGHTER) to write a story and have Mary Shelley declare it better than Frankenstein. (read the rest of this shit…)
As I’ve mentioned 
MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN is director Kenneth Branagh’s attempt to redo the story as a romantic period melodrama. You still got your mad science lab, but also wigs and corsets and all that shit. Branagh himself plays Victor Frankenstein, and this is in the era when men in historical dramas had to have long Fabio hair. He cast himself as the doctor who creates his monster while shirtless, running around pulling heavy levers to show off his glistening muscles.
