Few people remember that the titular Bride only appears in the last few minutes of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein. And even then, she doesn’t actually utter a word, just a deafening screech upon seeing the monster that is her groom-to-be. Crestfallen at being rejected by the only other being like him, Frankenstein’s monster declares, "We belong dead," before destroying himself and his Bride. But despite such short screentime (which barely clocks in at 5 minutes), Elsa Lancaster’s Bride, with her electric-shock hair and wide-eyed stare, casts a long shadow in pop culture. She’s been the subject of many reimaginings and reboots (including one 1985 flop starring Sting and Jennifer Beals), but none are as radical — or radically disappointing — as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!The Bride! is a strange metatextual ghost story, a science-fiction horror sequel, and a 1920s mob thriller all in one. It’s a hodgepodge of wild ideas and huge swings, and you kind of have to admire it for that. But it’s also a huge tonal and stylistic mess.What if Frankenstein’s Monster and the Bride were Bonnie and Clyde? It’s a fun premise that doesn’t have as much longevity as you think. | Warner Bros.The Bride! opens with an eerie monologue from Mary Shelley herself (Jessie Buckley), as she mourns how her demise prevented her from producing a sequel to Frankenstein. But trapped in a strange purgatory, Shelley discovers that she can act out this sequel herself, by possessing the body of a 1920s moll, Ida (also Buckley), and kickstarting her murder at the hands of two Chicago gangsters — which happens right around the time that Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale), now going by Frank, arrives in town to beg the eccentric Dr. Euphronius (Annette Benning) to make him a mate. Frank and Euphronius dig up Ida’s body and revive her without so much as a hitch, though she has no memory of who she was and possesses a strange penchant for occasionally quoting literature with a British accent. But what she does have is an insatiable joie de vivre, which leads to Frank and his new Bride to go on a debaucherous binge through the seedy underworld of Chicago. When that binge inevitably ends in bloodshed, the two flee across America, becoming Bonnie and Clyde-style runaways who accidentally start a revolution — and get embroiled in a criminal case involving the same gangsters that murdered Ida.If that sounds like a lot of movie, it is. The Bride! is a jam-packed pastiche with so many storylines and references that it’s at risk for overflowing (or, more fittingly, exploding). And Gyllenhaal, who writes and directs the movie, makes sure the style is to match. A maximalist homage to the Roaring '20s, The Bride! takes the idea of “What if Frankenstein’s monster and his Bride were alive in the ‘20s” and runs with it, marrying the steampunk-inspired stylings of James Whale’s original film with the hedonistic excess of the ‘20s. The result is a punky, anachronistic visual and production style that is continuously billboarding just how edgy it all is. Dr. Euphronius and her assistant are given barely any screentime. | Warner Bros.The provocative edginess is embodied by the design of the Bride herself. Rocking a bright orange flapper dress, a shock of white hair, and an artfully placed bloodstain on her lip and cheek, Buckley’s Bride seems tailor-made to be a costume that moviegoers will don to see this film in theaters. This is even folded into the movie itself, when the Bride sparks a radical feminist revolution of women who don the same bloodstain to demand change from society (what change exactly? The film doesn’t seem interested in that). Perhaps that’s just a sly reference to the cultural legacy that Elsa Lancaster’s portrayal of the Bride of Frankenstein left, inspiring so many fictional and real women to shape themselves in her image. Or perhaps it’s a send-up of a Community episode where an artfully-placed face smear resulted in a revolution. In some ways Bride! seems like a movie that was reverse engineered from a studio note asking how they can bring audiences into theaters in the way that Barbie did, offering ready-made costumes that couples can wear to see The Bride! in theaters. That’s perhaps why the movie feels more costume art than art; a cynically crafted hodgepodge of references designed to grab the rapidly depleting attention spans of contemporary audiences.That’s not to say some of the film’s bigger swings aren’t at least interesting. The Bride! frequently dips into surreal musical interludes, courtesy of Frank’s obsession with matinee idol Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). But even these wonderfully bizarre dips into musical theatre feel cynical — its “theater of the mind” framing feels as if it’s borrowed straight from Joker: Folie à Deux, which the movie may well have, considering it shares a cinematographer with Todd Phillips’ two films in Lawrence Sher. And there’s the fact that having Frankenstein’s monster doing a dance routine feels like an explicit callback to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein; Frank and The Bride even dance to “Putting on the Ritz”!The Bride! is stylish and showy to a fault. | Warner Bros.The Bride! might have worked just by virtue of its star-studded cast. Bale is genuinely great as Frank, delivering a performance that’s as tortured and sympathetic as the best depictions of Frankenstein’s monster. But Buckley, on the eve of her probable Oscar win, gives perhaps one of the worst performances of her career — loud and abrasive and showy, without any of the emotional complexity that her past performances have displayed. It’s a disappointing step down from Buckley and Gyllenhaal’s last collaboration and Gyllenhaal’s first feature, The Lost Daughter. All the emotionally layered nuance of that 2021 film is thrown away in favor of provocative showboating that overwhelms and overshadows the talented cast; even Bening, Peter Sarsgaard, and Penelope Cruz — the latter two being involved in the film’s hackneyed mob-thriller subplot — deliver paper-thin performances.The Bride! comes at a strange time. Mary Shelley’s creation has never been more popular, with films like Yorgos Lanthimos’ Frankenstein-esque Poor Things and Guillermo del Toro’s slavishly faithful Frankenstein releasing in quick succession. On the tail of these two acclaimed films, The Bride! already feels stale and trite. Its edgy reimagining of Frankenstein and his Bride feels like it was conceived in a vacuum, or in a time before we already had radical feminist interpretations of the story, or sympathetic depictions of the monster. What more does it have to say? Therein lies the failing of The Bride!: it wants so desperately to be novel and provocative, that it forgets to offer anything of substance.The Bride! opens in theaters March 6.