The Bride! Is a mismatched metatextual movie marriage

"Here comes the motherf***ing bride!" insists a spectral Mary Shelley, the quasi-narrator of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!, who lives solely in the conscience of our titular character.

Frankenstein's monster (Christian Bale) — here referred to as "Frank" — has dug up a woman's corpse in his desperate quest for sexual companionship, and he and "mad scientist" Dr Euphronious (Annette Benning) have revived her for one purpose.

What they didn't account for, however, was whether said "Bride" (Jessie Buckley) would be amenable to that task. And, look, whether the real Shelley actually envisioned a bride for her famed creation Frankenstein doesn't matter here: it's intended as an abrasive, third-wave feminist call to action, draped in layers of meta.

But a narrative full of nods and winks to prior films, novels and TV shows does not necessarily make a good film.

Though The Bride! immediately stands out as distinct with its production design — evoking a grimy, 1930s gangster flick mixed with MGM musicals — it struggles to land its central feminist thesis among bizarre tonal shifts, odd casting choices and a script stuffed full of Franken-Easter Eggs.

Let's get one thing straight: Jessie Buckley as the Bride is positively luminous. Embodying a jazz-loving, tic-spitting street walker-turned-blank-canvas (who refuses to be anything but blank), Buckley lights a fire that burns throughout the film and beyond.

She crafts a character that far surpasses that image of the Bride as a wide-eyed monochrome mute with gravity-defying hair. Wisecracking, confident and sex-positive, this Bride may not have been what Frank was expecting at all, but he still falls for her, and hard.

After a nightclub outing goes awry, Frank and his paramour find themselves on the run from the law.

As our undead Bonnie and Clyde navigate angry mobs and police hunts, the Bride finds herself questioning how she came to be with Frank in the first place.

With all memories of her former life wiped, she's been told that he and she were already married, and that an unspecified "accident" rendered her unconscious and amnesiac.

Being no clueless damsel, the Bride suspects this is not the truth. This is how the question of consent enters the film, and though it is dealt with rather clumsily by Gyllenhaal, it does add a layer of modern interest to the story.

Alas,The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal's debut feature as writer and director, tries to be too many things all at once: a doomed romance, a feminist treatise, a sci-fi social satire, and … a meta musical that makes multiple bizarre references to Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein.

To say that a nod to such a film doesn't belong here seems obvious — so obvious in fact that you have to wonder what was going through Gyllenhaal's mind.

Though the musical numbers are boldly choreographed and expertly executed, they do not gel well with the rest of the film. Plus, the decision to cast Gyllenhaal's brother, Jake, in the role of Ronnie Reed, the in-world movie musical actor who Frank admires deeply, just felt wrong. If he had not been so recognisable it may have played better, but the decision as is comes across as nepotistic and unintentionally comical.

In its best moments, The Bride! is an electrifying neo-noir tale where the women of America crack onto the fact that their role in society is, by design, subservient, and riot against that.

In its worst moments, it is a patchwork of ideas and metatextual references that play like the incoherent ramblings of an actor who watched The Bride of Frankenstein recently and has some ideas.

Those ideas also include a B-plot where the star-crossed lovers are trailed by a pair of detectives (Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz) who banter like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell (adding another tonal clash to the film).

These detective scenes play out as a screwball comedy, while Frank and Bride play out their crime drama-cum-doomed romance (except for when they're singing and dancing). But the addition of these characters also increases the sense of urgency for our leading pair: as they fall more deeply in love, their time is increasingly running out.

In amongst all of this, like Mary Shelley in the Bride's mind, is a powerful thesis struggling to get out. We do see glimpses of it, in scenes where the Bride recognises her feminine autonomy (and lack thereof).

Intriguing questions about sex, consent and individual independence peek out among the script like wildflowers — but it's obvious that Gyllenhaal, as a burgeoning film artist, doesn't really have a clue how to grow them.

The film's cons aren't always the fault of the director, though. As Jessie Buckley carves an electrified path as the Bride, Christian Bale here has the unfortunate task of playing the famed creature of Frankenstein while the colossal image of Jacob Elordi's version is still fresh in our minds.

In comparison to that ferociously good performance, Bale bumbles and sputters. Had we not seen Guillermo Del Toro's brilliant Frankenstein just months prior, perhaps The Bride! would land more of its ambitious leaps.

The Bride! is in cinemas now.