The Bride!

Maggie Gyllenhaal follows up her terrific directorial debut The Lost Daughter with one of those maximalist, director-first, sophomore efforts that auteurists seem to believe filmmakers "deserve." What a bunch of shit. This spin on The Bride of Frankenstein is one of the few films that could make Guillermo del Toro's globby, pretentious yet feebleminded Frankenstein from the prior year look good by comparison. The Bride! is an insufferably tedious piece of fake-punk, pseudo-feminist, looky-what-I'm-doing! piece of pretension; a filmmaker playing around with classic literature, contemproary themes, and overt messaging for over two hours with the all the nuance of a Pete Hegseth Quantico address. So much for me always liking Jessie Buckley even when I don't like the film: every time Gyllenhaal cut back to yet another close-up of Buckley as Mary Shelley made me start to loath seeing the great actress on screen. Have we really exhausted these old stories to this degree? Maybe so. After del Toro's A-list mediocrity, Robert Eggers' self-satisfied Nosferatu, and Gyllenhaal's Joker: Folie à Deux mixed with Babylon by way of a of Women's Studies sylibus summerized by AI, the next time I see a celebrity director coming out with another spin on a classic monster movie my response will be, "I would prefer not to."