There’s a good movie somewhere inside The Bride!—perhaps several. The irony is that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ambitious reimagining of the Frankenstein mythos feels almost as stitched together as the monster at its center. The film clearly springs from a place of imagination and artistic ambition, drawing inspiration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and James Whale’s immortal Bride of Frankenstein from 1935.

But ambition alone doesn’t always produce cohesion.

Gyllenhaal’s picture is an unusual mix of gothic romance, crime drama, musical spectacle, and monster movie. And that mixture is both the film’s greatest strength and its biggest challenge.

There are moments of genuine cinematic electricity here—particularly in the performances, the cinematography, and the surprising nods to classic Warner Bros. song-and-dance spectacles. But the screenplay struggles to unify its many influences. What we get is a film assembled from fascinating narrative parts that never quite fuse into a single organism.

Still, there is much here worth discussing—from the performances of Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, to the film’s unusual tonal mixture of gothic romance, crime drama, and musical fantasy.

Joining me today is returning guest and friend of the show Brad Biewer, host of the Cinema Speak podcast.