I saw this movie in a Thursday Early screening, and I knew there was trouble by the sparsity of the crowd. In spite of coming from an accomplished actress as director with an award nominated film in her directing resume, there was plenty to doubt. This was obviously going to be a punk rock version of the Bride of Frankenstein, but it is hard to tell who would be the audience. We were there as fans of actress Jessie Buckley, who should be grateful this movie opened after the Academy Award voting this year had closed. She was terrific in “Hamnet” but over the top and more anonymous than expected in this. 

From the start of the film, when the ghost of Mary Shelly, reaches out for an insane story follow up to her famous novel, you get chaos. Somehow her spirit possesses a mob good time girl, and then that woman is murdered and her body rejuvenated by a mad doctor, prompted to do so by the creature that Mary Shelly invented. Yeah, it’s that kind of batshit crazy and it gets more convoluted as well. There is a side story that involves the mobster who is responsible for the crime in Chicago in the 1930s, and he is not named Al Capone , but rather has the last name of Lupino, who is pursued by the dead woman reborn who it turns out was named Ida. Film fans will recognize this combination of names as the identity of actress and proto-feminist director Ida Lupino, the most well known woman director of films in the 40s and 50s in Hollywood. That barely scratches the surface of the movie references that the film piles on.

“Frank”, the so named creature (maybe a lazy choice, maybe deliberately stupid), is a fan of Ronnie Reed, a singing and dancing movie star clearly inspired by Fred Astaire. Somehow, the Frankenstein Monster and his Bride, end up in a road picture, like a less romantic Gable and Colbert, more like Bonnie and Clyde or Mickey and Mallory. Death and Michael Jackson dance moves follow. Then we throw in a pursuing detective and his secretary, the real brains of the pair, and you have a chase movie. Scene to scene we watch the pursuers and the pursued, hop skip and jump through towns connected by the movies of Ronnie reed, for no particular reason. At one point a cult of women decide to emulate the Bride as if she were a modern YouTube influencer, advocating death and weird makeup tips. Pay close attention to when this happens because although it gets a whole 30 seconds of screen time, it will be a big part of the resolution of the film. 

OK, so this is all supposed to be absurdist art we are absorbing for two plus hours, but only the occasional image suggests anything artistic, the rest of it is gibberish. Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley, overact the vast majority of the time, diminishing the moments in the film when you might have had some interest in their characters. Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as the pursuers are moistly wasted with motives that are fuzzy and story arcs that make no sense. When the credits at the end of the movie start with The Monster Mash as the closing song, it is clear that this was one long cartoon. Randomly sticking incomplete feminist ideas into a Pepe LePew short, makes no sense an swallows up any purpose the movie might have.

I can say that I enjoyed watching the film in several sequences, but that this is clearly not a good movie and it’s existence is a puzzle. Who thought the script was worth the effort, much less the money that it took. Maggie Gyllenhaal got too far out over her skis and the result is a mildly interesting mess that will be lucky to get midnight screenings at art house theaters but not ant acclaim. This is “The Room” for horror film fans, and that may sound inviting, I suspect most of you will not feel so if you spent the night with it.