Maggie Gyllenhaal’s imaginative adaptation of the Frankenstein story, starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, leaves its premise and its principles undeveloped.

The Bride! is guilty of overindulging in feminist buzzwords and girl power imagery; it even has Buckley's Bride jarringly screaming "Me too! Me too!" in the final act. But it never lives up to the radical display of female autonomy it promised. And therein lies the real tragedy.

Never mind spare body parts. In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, our eponymous newlywed is composed of three entirely separate and competing personalities. There is Ida, a seeming gangster’s mol hanging out in 1930s Chi during the post-Prohibition boom when we meet her;

Her version of The Bride! is much harder to parse, and much harder to swallow. It’s a provocation and a challenge — a movie designed to prickle and puzzle the brain more than warm the heart. At times,