The new, full-length trailer for Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s “The Bride!” offers the best look yet at the director’s “totally punk” take on “The Bride of Frankenstein.”
Jessie Buckley’s reanimated Bride is at the center of the trailer, which opens with its eponymous character’s death and her subsequent resurrection, courtesy of her lonely paramour, Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), and his co-conspirator scientist (Annette Bening). From there, the “Bride!” trailer devolves into flashes of violence, dance and love, which call to mind romantic crime stories like “Bonnie and Clyde” rather than any previous big-screen “Frankenstein” adaptation.
According to Gyllenhaal, who was inspired to revisit 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein” after seeing a man’s full-sleeve tattoo of Elsa Lanchester’s iconic movie monster at a party, that was intentional. “I was interested in subverting a classic movie style. So, yes, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘Badlands’ and even ‘Metropolis,’” she explained at a Q&A event for the trailer on Wednesday. “I think about a movie like ‘Wild at Heart’ that does subvert those classic movie things in a David Lynch way, which is different than my way.”
Coming off the success of her directorial debut, 2021’s “The Lost Daughter,” Gyllenhaal said she wanted to try to capture a kind of taboo truth again — this time, in a “big pop way.” In preparation, Bale began sending Gyllenhaal photos and videos of Sid Vicious for inspiration, which only further reinforced the “totally punk” vibe she wanted to capture onscreen. “There is just an aspect of straight-up punk in the movie,” Gyllenhaal noted, pointing toward the film’s centering of its oft-sidelined lead as further proof.
“The Bride!” also marks a reunion between Gyllenhaal and Buckley, who starred in “The Lost Daughter.” While Gyllenhaal tried to write the role of the Bride without anyone specific in mind, she quickly realized, “Okay. It’s only Jessie. I really still don’t know who else could have played this part.” Behind the camera, Gyllenhaal wanted to hone in on the “formidable power” of her iconic heroine, a desire which stemmed from rewatching director James Whale’s classic 1935 film.
“Frankenstein[‘s Creature] is a monster, of course, who does monstrous, awful things, but he’s also beautiful, human, kind and so lonely. So his ask for a mate, which is part of the book, which is part of the mythology, is really understandable,” Gyllenhaal noted. “At the same time, what about the mate? He’s asking to have someone brought back from the dead to be his girlfriend. Well, what about her? That’s what this movie, I think, really gets into. What if she comes back and she has her own needs and her own agenda?”
Its centering of Buckley’s Bride is not the only thing that differentiates Gyllenhaal’s film from past “Frankenstein” adaptations. “The Bride!” is, for instance, not set in the 1800s but in a version of the 1930s that Gyllenhaal called “the ’30s by way of downtown New York 1981.” While the director calls “The Bride!” a “deep, deep love story about a very imperfect connection,” the film’s latest trailer also teases moments of sweeping spectacle, surreality and magic.
The filmmaker further teased that “The Bride!” will “grow” to Imax ratio whenever it enters one of its character’s minds. “The movie has a lot of magic in it, as you can imagine, because we’re bringing people back to life,” Gyllenhaal explained. Unlike most Imax films, which try not to call attention to their ratio transitions, Gyllenhaal said she wanted to spotlight and animate them — in a way that has purportedly never been done before.
“I wanted to know what would happen if you grew it, if you animated it. There are examples of doing it, but what they told me, which I thought was amazing, is that it hasn’t been done like this before, in the way that we animate it,” she teased. “My imagining of what Imax could offer ended up being something that has never been done before.”
Viewers will get to see exactly what Gyllenhaal means when “The Bride!” comes alive in theaters on March 6.
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