The Bride of Frankenstein lives for only five minutes or so of her 1935 movie. She never speaks a word. A hiss. A scream. And, with that, her creators recognise her abhorrence and snuff out instantly the existence they toiled so hard to revive. If a filmmaker like Maggie Gyllenhaal were to lend that monstrous woman a voice, then why wouldn’t it belong to the star of her directorial debut, 2021’s The Lost Daughter, and a soon-to-be Oscar winner, Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley?
In The Bride! (note the exclamation point), Buckley is a mass-destructive cyclone of female rage, thrusting and spitting and ripping out tongues and pulling her skirt up and pointing a pistol sky high with tears in her eyes and an ink stain splattered across her lips like a gunshot wound. Buckley bleached her eyebrows for the role. That means there’s no escape here from those deep brown eyes. You start falling into them and never stop falling until you’ve been consumed entirely. If Hamnet proved the actor could tear down every barrier between herself and grief, then The Bride! does the very same with anger.
