‘The Bride!’ review: Frankie, my dear.

The story comes into focus with the arrival of yet another legend, Frankenstein’s monster — or Frank, as he likes to be called.

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Mary Shelley was just 20 when her wild, mind-expanding first novel, “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” (1818), was published. By the time she turned 25, she had suffered a series of unspeakable losses, including the death of three young children and her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. For its part, her famous creation kept spawning new and sometimes wheezing life, begetting plays, films, TV shows, scholarly works, the usual. Last year brought Guillermo del Toro’s take on “Frankenstein,” and now there’s Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!,” which draws a bold if wobbly line from Shelley’s age to our own.

Gyllenhaal wrote and directed “The Bride!,” and has made good on that exclamation point with a time-shifting, genre-hopping movie that yowls and growls and shrieks, and every so often breaks out into peppy (literal) song. It doesn’t always make sense tonally and intellectually, but the whole thing is energetic, handsome and stocked with enough expert, appealing performers to hold your interest through the rougher, less coherent passages. Similar to what Emerald Fennell did in her recent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” Gyllenhaal has taken one of the most famous novels by a 19th-century female writer to again reconsider the vexed, enduringly provocative figure of the monstrous woman.

To that end, Gyllenhaal has exhumed Mary Shelley to serve as the movie’s narrator and historically freighted, existentially weary totem. Played by Jessie Buckley, this Mary emerges in dramatic chiaroscuro, eyes flashing darkly. She’s immortal, sure; she’s also dead, as she informs you. Locked in a kind of limbo, Mary looks and sounds understandably and seriously ticked off, but she’s got some thoughts, a jumble of notions about horror and love, and before long she’s seized on a new vehicle through which to express herself: Ida, who’s also played by Buckley. A bottle blonde with smudged makeup and a dangerous leer, Ida is hanging around gangsters in 1930s Chicago when she enters, a sparky live wire who, before long, is also dead.

The human factor becomes all the more crucial after Ida is reanimated — with a shock of hair and an inky splat on her face — and she and Frank run off, dead hand in dead hand.

The story comes into focus with the arrival of yet another legend, Frankenstein’s monster — or Frank, as he likes to be called. Played with unexpected charm and a deep well of melancholy by Christian Bale, Frank has — with the cosmic coincidence that the movies excel at — arrived in Chicago seeking help from a scientist, Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening). He wants a mate, and the doctor has the requisite combination of brains, curiosity and hubris to be interested in granting his wish. Conveniently, she also has one of those nicely outfitted home laboratories that mad scientists in movies often have as well as the regulation weird helper, Greta (the invaluable Jeannie Berlin), who skulks in and out as needed.

Gyllenhaal sets up her intriguing, nicely polished pieces well enough but there are far too many of them, and she tends to linger so long in a scene that she dilutes their effect. Ida’s first appearance is a grabber but quickly grinds on. She’s seated at a crowded table in a noisy nightclub, her dark roots peeping through her straw-colored hair, her mouth edged in lightly amused contempt. As a performer, Buckley can go soft, melting with expressive vulnerability, but hers is the softness that is tempered by grit. You can feel the resiliency in Buckley, a quality of earned toughness that at once suggests history and conveys determination, and which can help tether even an outlandish character like Ida in real human feeling.

The human factor becomes all the more crucial after Ida is reanimated — with a shock of hair and an inky splat on her face — and she and Frank run off, dead hand in dead hand. They cavort, quarrel and go to the movies to watch the unctuous Hollywood musical star, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal, the director’s brother). At one point, Ida appears in a feathered dress similar to the one that Ginger Rogers wore when she danced cheek to cheek with Fred Astaire in the 1935 gem “Top Hat.” And because Ida and Frank are young enough, in love enough and kill people — and because Gyllenhaal overloads this movie with too many scattershot ideas, too many references, just too, too much — they also take cues from the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, another romantically entangled couple that just won’t stay dead.

As Ida and Frank run wild — enter Peter Sarsgaard (the director’s husband) and Penélope Cruz as detectives — Gyllenhaal repeatedly cuts back to Mary, shifting between the outlaws and their nominal creator brooding in her shadows. There’s no bride in “Frankenstein,” though the specter of a mate for the monster hovers over the story. “I ought to be thy Adam,” the monster tells Dr. Frankenstein, implying that there should be an Eve. The doctor refuses. In the eerily beautiful 1935 film “The Bride of Frankenstein,” director James Whale did what the bad doctor and Mary Shelley did not by giving the monster (Boris Karloff) a glorious complement, a reanimated woman (Elsa Lanchester). She’s only on screen briefly, but she and the horror she expresses at the monster she’s meant to mate with are haunting.

Despite the ooze and spew that Gyllenhaal splashes across the scenery she isn’t interested in haunting the audience, much less terrifying it. She clearly wants to entertain you, to deliver a little soft shoe and some seductive laughs, yet she also wants to go hard, to peel away skin, dig into wounds and howl. She rallies for women to bite off tongues, not bite their own. And she does just that, though the louder Gyllenhaal rages, the more incoherent the movie becomes with its lurching tones and moods, strained allusions, romantic longing and a post-Weinstein feminist cri de coeur that lands with a thud. The whole thing is exhausting, at times wincingly self-indulgent, entirely heartfelt and yet also relatable, perhaps especially for women who, when confronted with unrelenting monstrousness, need to give birth to their own monsters.

‘The Bride!’

Rated R for carnage most foul. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters.