The empowerment of monsters according to Maggie Gyllenhaal

Maybe The bride! (The bride!) has as its starting point The Bride of FrankensteinBut it's neither a sequel, nor a remakenot one reboot nor any other label affiliated with Hollywood's franchise logic. Maggie Gyllenhaal, an actress who has never shied away from risk (she revealed herself with the sadomasochistic romance of Secretary) and that in The Dark DaughterHer directorial debut, while acknowledging influences like Claire Denis and Lucrecia Martel, presents the film as a fiercely autonomous manifesto of pop feminism. This is clear from the opening scene, in which Mary Shelley confesses that in Frankenstein She was only able to capture a fragment of what she wanted to tell. Then, the writer's specter cracks the diegesis and literally possesses the body of a prostitute who will become the protagonist of a feverish fiction.

The device's self-awareness is significant, considering that what has reached the screen is not exactly what was brewing in Gyllenhaal's head, who has had to moderate his vision of a monstrous romance sprinkled with gangsters and musical interludes, in which the dazzling, empowering energy conveys the ethics of the riot grrrl in the 1930s. In any case, The bride! It was never meant to be a balanced film (let alone a perfect one), and there is a certain poetic logic in its shamelessly displaying the scars left by studio interference: these wounds, so similar to those that cover the skin of the protagonists, are proof that the project was on the right track.