The Bride!

Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! doesn't believe in leaving anything unsaid. That The Bride! and the Bride don't wilt under these expectations is the powerhouse performance by Buckley, who is game to every mercurial emotion demanded of her role. The Bride! too works the best when it is not trying too hard.

Buckley gives it such outrageous craziness and she is a great pairing with the stolid Bale, especially when they go into an uncontrolled jerking and twitching choreography with the other revellers at a classy white-tie event. Without Buckley, this would have been lacking; with her, it's a very bizarre and enjoyable spectacle of married bliss.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's feminist reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein is both powerful and radical, but narratively unruly.

Unfortunately, The Bride! arrives not as feminist triumph but as a true hot mess. But ultimately what the film most exudes is incompetence. The Bride! is a crushing disappointment that almost obscures the brilliance and sensitivity she displayed in The Lost Daughter.

Yet, the experience of watching it involves a constant awareness of its fragility, because every new flourish is perched perilously on the edge of collapse, and the film repeatedly proves how difficult it is to sustain such a baroque assemblage without the seams giving way and the underlying machinery spilling into view. Despite these strengths, the film eventually becomes exhausting, partly because the script piles ideological declarations, grotesque violence, and flamboyant spectacle into a restless swirl that rarely clarifies its own intentions.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's movie is a scrappy feminist take-off on the "Frankenstein" myth that could have used more storytelling juice.