Maggie Gyllenhaal had earned a little currency as a filmmaker and wanted to make something big. Something epic. Something honest. Something that wouldn’t just hit a vein, as she’d done with her first film, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter,” but burst it wide-open. She wanted there to be blood all over the room — both proverbially speaking and, in the case of her new film “The Bride!” literally too.
What started as a curiosity about an image of Elsa Lanchester’s “Bride of Frankenstein” she saw on a tattoo, evolved, through her wild imagination, into one of the year’s most audacious, electric films. Like her studio brethren “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another,” “The Bride!” is a kind of genre-defying spectacle that’s bursting with personality and full of things that the filmmaker loves. It’s got romance, action, dancing, matinee idols, professional women, big ideas, thorny themes and Jessie Buckley, a kindred spirit who, like Gyllenhaal, is fascinated by the idea of meeting your monster.
