The Bride!

The Bride!

Writer & Director ~ Maggie Gyllenhaal

2025, USA-France

Stars ~ Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening

There are title cards and then further explanation via long opening monologue by Mary Shelly, explaining that her spirit has designs on reclaiming her seminal text for the ladies and weirdly indicative of the overkill to come. It's where an exclamation to the name and swearing on the poster is seen as anarchic. One could argue that as a portayal of reckless, irresponsible, egotistical masculinity, ‘Frankenstein’ already has a feminist core, but there’s always room for more elaboration. After all, James Wale’s ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ hardly features the epoymous muse at all, so Gyllenhall sets out to rectify that. It could be seen that Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’ did this in its way, with its its exploration of nature and nurture and Bella Baxter’s determination to discover for herself the outside and what she might be, but coming against patriarchal restrictions. Some felt Emma Stone’s performance overpraised and overacted, but it felt of a piece as a tribute to the herky-jerky Ella Lanchester’s 1935 Bride and the steampunky aesthetic. The cookieness never got in the way of agenda.

Jesse Buckly is a fine actor, but here she is simply dialled to Look At Me!! Ida is set as contrarian and incessant rather than nuanced, and she Never. Shuts. Up. Often, any point slips away because there’s no space to digest. My preference is for Annette Benning and Penélope Cruz, who both have more interesting, rounded characters with feminist points to be made. Frank’s design is good, less Del Toro Slabs-of-Meat and more Karloff-but-not-green, although his rendidition of the monster is more straight lost soul, less charismatic than the rest of the film: Ida is more an art project with a declarative design that moves into The Joker territory of mimicry and violent anarchy (expect splattered faces next Halloween). Ida is often simply annoying and conceited, giving away hiding places by launching into Kathreen Hepburn impersonations. As much irritating as defiant. If any part of her behaviour is down to brain damage from resurrection, this isn’t a plot point. The premise is that these two revenants are outsiders, scorned and unaccepted by society, but they spend a lot of time going to parties and bustling past audiences to their seats in the cinema and becoming anti-heroes.

It is 1930s Chicago but this is the kind of filmmaking where anachronisms don’t particularly matter, in the spirit of throwing jellybeans of pop culture in the air to see what lands. Fever Ray makes a nightclub appearance: doesn’t make any sense but at least she’s good. Then there’s even a dance number for ‘Putting on the Ritz’ which might make you slap your forehead – I mean: really? – before our couple go off to live out Bonnie and Clyde fantasies, by which genre-leap any message has long since lost to freebasing references. It’s a mess with a few hints of brilliance that never come to fruition. And then it ends with ‘The Monster Mash’, which seems to be a last-minute attempt to add “tackiness” to counter whatever was good and seriousness about whatever this was trying to be.

In a Lonely Place

In a Lonely Place

Novel~ Dorothy B. Hughes, 1947

 

Director ~Nicholas Ray

Writers ~ Andrew Solt, Edmund H. North

1950, USA

Stars ~ Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy

 

Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel is the tale of a serial killer shamming his way from place to place, a psychological study with noir garb. As a female writer, she convincingly traces Dixon Steele’s infatuation with women, through jealousy and misogyny to barely checked anger and murderous intent. Steele is not quite as arrogant as Lou Ford in ‘The Killer Inside Me’, but similarly convinced he has others fooled, that he’s untouchable. It is Los Angeles, post-World War II and there’s a strangler on the loose, murdering women. Dix is pretending to be a writer and ingratiates himself with an old friend working on the case. The eponymous place is one of misogyny and anger which cannot help but flare up in Dix. He is a damaged man, a monster emerging from that fog of the first pages, prowling the streets at night. 

A prolific and award-winning novelist, Hughes’ book is ahead of its time in focusing on a serial killer’s mindset and toxic masculinity, it exudes noir suspense where the battleground is between the sexes and psychologies rather than criminality. One of its best moments is where the two very different women of his infatuation rub up against each other in his lounge. Sensationalism and sleaziness aren’t the agenda: indeed, the kills happen “off screen”, as it were. To get it out of the way: Dixon Steele is a name worthy of 'Carry On'. Dix’s descent/escalation into murderous sexism is repellent and Hughes isn’t interested in making him charm the reader, although we can see how he might be perceived to have charm to the other characters: we’re too privileged with an awareness to his inner workings and jealousy. One can almost sense it as a woman’s writing experiment in speculating about violent men, although there is a hardboiled attitude that fits it in untroubled with the thriller genre.

Developed by Humphry Bogart’s own independent Santana Productions, the film has come to feature on several “best of” lists, including from ‘Slant’ and Robert Ebert. It is obvious given the censorship at the time that was no doubt impossible for Bogart to be cast as an irredeemable serial killer, no matter how audiences were used to him being an anti-hero, which makes Hugh’s book a strange choice. The adaption is quite an altered beast from the novel, although general details remain. Here, Dix is a screenwriter rather than a faux author which opens the film’s major addition as a commentary of the Hollywood of the time. Nicholas Ray’s fifth film, ‘In a Lonely Place’ is often mentioned along with ‘Sunset Boulevard’ as insider barbs and sour criticisms of the system. Indeed, one of the more impressive meta-moments is the scene where Steele describes that just an everyday scene in the kitchen can relay that they’re in love.

Dix’s ambiguity is the film’s own: we start with his looking in a rearview mirror, giving a zinger that he never watches his own films, almost losing his cool at a roadside altercation and left framed alone against the stop stencilled in the road. It’s a neat summary of his dilemma: reflection, intelligence, temper, warning, loneliness. Such is the ambiguity of his wryness and nihilism that we aren’t sure if he’s guilty of killing the hat check girl. Although the era was averse to criticism of the military, the suggestion of PTSD is there in both book and movie, but it also riffs on Bogart’s own temperament. Louise Brooks’ wrote in Sight and Sound that,

 

‘In a Lonely Place’ gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the character's pride in his art, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, were shared equally by the real Bogart.

(Brooks, Louise. Sight and Sound, Winter 1966/67,

Volume 36 Number 1, "Humphrey and Bogey.")

 

And if Dix’s character tapped into brawly Bogart’s own, the disillusion with the studio system comes from all the filmmakers. The screenplay is credited to  an authorship that is contested but includes Ray’s penchant for improvisation. Ray takes credit for rewriting the book’s ending which arguably elevates this story into a maturity that genre pictures rarely manage.

Once we have the measure of Dix, the film subtly slips to his love interest Laurel Grey. It is a much-lauded performance by Gloria Graeme, sensual, sleek, vulnerable, smart, in some ways just as elusive and slippery as Dix. It would seem that Dix also acts as Ray’s avatar, a chance to express his own difficulties with his reckless and sensitive self and the marriage to Graeme.

She was forced to sign a contract that agreed that she would not nag him, would always defer to the instructions without putting forward ideas of her own, that kind of disagreeably sexist stuff. But she did sign and in fact the shoot, despite the difficulties star and director may have been going through, apparently went smoothly. Indeed, despite the contract it plays very much as Graeme’s revenge on aggressive and possessive men. Graeme and Ray’s separation during production was kept a secret with Ray essentially living on set for a while. It is a wonder that the film doesn’t implode with all the background baggage, but rather it seems to hone so much focus and surely provided a more devastating and less tropey finale. It is an obvious passion- and passionate project.

There are plenty of quotable and sardonic lines (“What a grip. Comes from counting all that money.”), Bernett Guffey’s cinematography that delves into more grey than typical black-and-white high contrast, a memorable courtyard set between their apartments (based upon one of Ray’s actual addresses), a bedrock of strong side characters and Hadda Brooks singing to add to the jazzy heartbreak feel. Its strength is in focusing on fleeting happiness (“I was born when she kissed me…”, etc.), how people aren’t what we want them to be despite the romance, on how our key flaws ruin everything, how anger destroys what chance there may have been. How we leave ourselves in that lonely place. There’s a whole adult feel to the film that elevates it from mere genre delights to speaking of the simple tragedy of being who you are.

 

Mickey 17

Mickey 17

Director ~ Bong Joon Ho

Writers ~ Bong Joon Ho, Edward Ashton

2025, US-South Korea

Stars ~ Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Michael Monroe

Mickey 7

Edward Ashton, 2022

 

Of course, ‘Parasite’ was such a masterclass of balancing tone and genre that expectations were going to be high for Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up, ‘MICKEY 17’. Mickey 7 from the novel is increased to 17 but demoted to simply a dope for the film: he has less agency, less of the backchat and quiet smarts. The awareness and insight kept close to his chest is lost in the film, which operates on broader strokes. Bong calls the character of Mickey 7 “pathetic and ultimately hilarious”,* but surely that’s unfair and a misreading. At the centre of the kind of simple but direct metaphor that science-fiction excels at, in both prose and celluloid cloned Mickey is an unwitting victim and symbol of uncaring capitalism, new technology, the distillation of an expendable workforce. In the film, he also victim of slapstick – hence 17 rather than 7 – and more a straight-up idiot than the quietly sly and opinionated prose character. So, despite the excellence of Robert Pattinson, if you are a fan of the book, you may feel Mickey shortchanged.

 

Ashton’s novel is one of those smart pulps with a mild, struggling protagonists up against A Big Uncaring Future. It has more world-building, covers more well-thought-out background to and history of the planet colonisations, which is well thought-out and interesting. It too has a light tone which some may find underserves the big ideas, but it’s fun and engaging with several bright ideas and insights.

 

Bong’s film is a romp a little too amused with itself although the central idea fascinates and the effects look expensive. The difference is in a whackier tone and caricatures, with the colony owner Marshal is simply a Donald Trump parody with a manipulative and villainous trophy wife. Mark Ruffalo dives headfirst into the Trump impersonation that clearly puts the unsubtlety at the foremost that this is almost an SNL skit. The commentary is so clearly on the Trump-Musk era that it surely crimps the idea’s scope and evergreen observations on society, although others might see this as a sign of its urgency. Perhaps what is different is that the usual super-plotting nefariousness of bad guys has been replaced by the warmongering ignorance of the power-hungry elite.

 

Come the ending, the fascinating cloning concept and analogy seems to have slipped away, to count as secondary, lost in a mash-up of excellently imagined scifi setting, comedy, political satire and genre diversion. The alien encounter overwhelms the fascination of Mickey’s situation, and although that’s the trajectory of the source novel, there feels less of a balance here (although admittedly that could be simply a result of the book being first-person). Pattinson captures the exhaustion and trauma of dangerous work but swamped under the denouement of special-effects extravaganza, the focused humanity he represents feels lost. Bong is a master genre-blender, but there is something of the near-miss with this concoction. It may be fun enough, amusing and beautifully filmed, but there’s none of the perfection of ‘Parasite’ and less of the pleasing metaphor and serious defiance of ‘Snowpiercer’. A heady amusement that doesn’t quite monopolise its big ideas.

 

·         * - ‘Mickey 7’ (2022), Edward Ashton, Q&A with Bong Joon-Ho (Solaris, 2025)