The Frankensteined Feminism of The Bride!

Even before Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes a black-bile-spewing revenant, you wouldn’t call her a proper lady. At a shady gin joint in Chicago, 1936, she’s vacant-eyed, slurring, and lurching in her seat when she launches into a tirade against the local Mafia. The gangsters tolerate her until she rises up and vomits all over their king (Zlatko Buric), a toad-faced godfather who promptly orders his minions to give her the whack. And so they do, in this opening scene of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a jangly reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with a post–#Me Too spin. In this vision, loud, leaky, nasty women are ideal monsters to navigate issues of power, consent, and narrative control.