Entertainment
'MaXXXine' is Ti West's Hollywood horror story. The real-life locations are even scarier
Horror filmmaker Ti West steps out of the blackness behind the Bates Motel hours after the last tourist tram has made it to safety. Behind him looms the “Psycho” house where Mrs. Bates lurked in the window monitoring the movements of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane — a shot West references in his 2022 slasher “X,” set in 1979, about an elderly farm wife named Pearl who becomes murderously inflamed by a troupe of adult actors shooting a skin flick in her barn. Pearl, an aspiring performer herself, got her own movie the following year in West’s eponymous prequel that rewinds to 1918, when the psychotic failed starlet fed her rival to an alligator named Theda Bara.
Now, West is releasing the third chiller in the series, “MaXXXine,” which finds Maxine Minx, the sole survivor of the first film’s “Texas porn star massacre,” hellbent on becoming a legitimate movie star in 1980s Los Angeles. After six years of sex work, Maxine, played ferociously by Mia Goth, has finally landed her first mainstream role in a sequel called “The Puritan 2.” But her past is still in pursuit, with one chase scene sending Maxine fleeing for her life across the Universal Studios backlot, through the Old West facades to the New York stoops, eventually scampering up the jagged “Psycho” stairs right behind him.
“It’s a weird thing to point a camera at if you’re not making ‘Psycho,’” says West, 43, as he heads farther into the darkness, lighted only by a handful of eerie red lanterns. He calls his trilogy “movie-flavored movies” — artifice and dreams are the top notes. “X” is about scrappy strivers trying to break into the business; “Pearl,” about the dangers of buying into the fantasies onscreen. “MaXXXine,” the highest-profile film of West’s career, wrestles with accepting that Hollywood isn’t quite what one hopes.
Mia Goth in the movie “MaXXXine,” her third with West. “It was the first time I had that dynamic between me and a director where it felt there was something really intimate to it,” she says.
(A24)
“He was ready to deal with this kind of scale, and it’s definitely something he was hungry for,” Goth says, chiming in over Zoom. In addition to playing multiple roles across this mini-franchise, Goth co-wrote “Pearl” and executive-produced the last two films. “We just kind of manifested it,” she continues, “built this entire trilogy into existence. And it’s been incredible to see it unfold.”
West, however, tends to be scrupulously anti-hype. “It is not lost on me that there is a meta thing happening with these movies and me and Mia, and that’s gratifying and strange,” he says. “And it’s also something that we’ve never taken any time to stop and talk about. We were too busy making movies.”
While the marketing team at A24 is all in on “MaXXXine” — “I’ve never had a billboard before,” the director beams — West has been a legitimate filmmaker for well over a decade. His resume of well-regarded independent movies includes the 2016 cowboy vengeance drama “In a Valley of Violence” with Ethan Hawke and John Travolta, plus a string of festival hits like 2009’s “The House of the Devil,” which disposed of a pre-celeb Greta Gerwig early on in a marvelously nasty Hitchcock-esque shock.
“It hasn’t lost its mystique,” West says of the “Psycho” house, a “MaXXXine” location. “Even tonight it’s still like: What a rare opportunity to actually walk up the steps.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Still, he’s come a long way since his first trip to the Bates Motel. When he was in middle school, he and his family vacationed at Universal Studios Florida, which had just wrapped “Psycho IV” on its own copy of the set. As a promotional tie-in, the park launched an attraction that taught fans the camera tricks behind the famous shower scene. One volunteer got to brandish a rubber knife and learn how to stab a Marion Crane scream-a-like. West wasn’t chosen, but he went back home with a pair of Bates Motel souvenir slippers and an appreciation for film craft.
“Now that’s all gone, and it’s a Shrek ride or something,” he shrugs. “No offense to Shrek.”
West spent the rest of his youth in Wilmington, Del., renting five VHS tapes for $5 on Fridays at his local video store. One weekend, he rented “Habit,” a grungy but brilliant microbudget vampire flick made by filmmaker Larry Fessenden. Shortly after, he moved to New York and took a film class taught by director Kelly Reichardt, who’d played a cameo in the film. Reichardt introduced the two and Fessenden became West’s mentor, eventually producing his debut feature, “The Roost,” shot exactly 20 years ago with more moxie than money.
“Apparently, now we’re mentioned on the tour,” West adds of his upgraded circumstances, in mild disbelief. “I feel a little bit like I’ve made it.” Filming on the lot took Herculean coordination. Some theme-park trams were rerouted, others couldn’t be. Shots were hastily filmed in the gaps between gawkers. Once, the timing went awry and a few dozen tourists interrupted a take. Cameras out, the visitors snapped away at Goth and Elizabeth Debicki like they were tigers in a zoo.
West and his dog, Molly, visit Hollywood Forever Cemetery, one of the filming locations for “MaXXXine.”
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
If West is now a Hollywood animal himself, the only affectation he’s adopted is a tiny 12-pound black dog named Molly who accompanies him everywhere. During this night stroll, she’s quietly tucked into a sling around his hips. On set, Molly had her own chair that read “Executive Paw-ducer.” The next morning, as our personal tour of “MaXXXine’s” locations continues, she’s wearing an A24-branded leash and trying to sneak sips of West’s iced oat-milk latte.
Today, he and Molly and a photographer are piled into an SUV that stops at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the location where two of the film’s detectives, played by Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale, make a grisly discovery. (Molly insists on relieving herself in a spot without any graves — she’s a professional.) The fictional corpses planted here by the production were mutilated in the manner of Richard Ramirez, popularly known as the Night Stalker, the real-life L.A. serial killer who murdered at least 13 people during the ’80s. That paranoia is the film’s terrifying backdrop, just as the Spanish flu pandemic leaves scars on “Pearl.”
But this isn’t a Night Stalker story — there’s already half a dozen of those. “MaXXXine,” like West’s “The House of the Devil” before it, vibrates with the tension of Reagan-era Satanic panic, a moment of media-hyped conspiracy that manages to feel both old-fashioned and contemporary.
“When I was growing up, you could get arrested for skateboarding, and now it’s going to be in the Olympics,” West says. But grandstanding moralists stay the same, even if A24 had to hire faux protesters to wave placards that read, “Honor God, End Smut.”
“I’m hopeful that this October there are people that are going to dress up as her from all three movies,” West says of Goth’s many incarnations, including “MaXXXine,” pictured. “That’ll be really strange.”
(A24)
West puts a lot of emphasis on making the past look real, not cartoonish. No ridiculous zebra prints, no suburban mall pastels. Authenticity is baked into everything, from the camera techniques and practical effects to Maxine’s fried split ends.
The “MaXXXine” review embargo has just broken as our car arrives at Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue, but West barely glances at his phone. “It’ll be the appropriate mixture of ‘best movie of the three,’ ‘worst movie ever,’” he says calmly. So far, the critics like it, but West seems more fulfilled by the act of making, promoting and releasing three films in four years with barely a day off. During that same time span, he also met his fiancée, DJ Alison Wonderland, and welcomed his first child, who was born two weeks after the trilogy wrapped. (Wonderland, nine months pregnant at the time, cameos in the film spinning records at a nightclub.)
“Weirdly enough, my first place in Los Angeles was also on Hollywood Boulevard,” West says, crossing the street toward Maxine’s second-story dump, which usually houses overstock from the Hollywood Suit Outlet next door.
He moved to L.A. in 2005 after wrapping “The Roost,” figuring the natural progression of things was to head west and write another script. Relocation was daunting. “There’s no real sense of where you’re supposed to live and who to send the script to,” he laughs. His first spot was quieter — “a little garden apartment, very L.A.” — but it amused him to get mail addressed to Ti West, Hollywood Blvd.
“I didn’t have an interest in telling that ‘Hollywood chews you up and spits you out’ story,” says West, on Hollywood Boulevard where the movie was shot.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Nearly two decades later, he’s lived and worked here for so long that he pokes fun at being that naive kid who hoped he’d be instantly handed the keys to the city. In truth, his ascent has been a grind. West kept at it, as did colleagues Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski and the Duplass Brothers, who also premiered films alongside “The Roost” at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, the year that mumblecore became a movement.
They were all “making very tiny movies,” West remembers. “I think that’s where the chip on your shoulder comes from: Why doesn’t someone just realize all the work I’ve been putting in? Why don’t they know that I’m up 19 hours a day, seven days a week, working on this thing?” He describes those lean, exhausting years like someone who’s scaled his share of mountains.
“But I came of age in the ’90s, when making independent movies was cool,” he continues. “Are the 25-year-olds sleeping on floors doing that now? Or do they want to be making influencer content? Probably I would have wanted to do that too because if it goes viral, you just jump ahead. If you’re trying to change your life, that’s a quicker path.”
“We were in the Old West town and I was like, ‘Ti, this is the coolest job in the world,’” says Goth. “And he looked at me like, ‘I know.’ And we were just so giddy.”
(A24)
West’s first climb when he arrived in town was a hike up to the Hollywood sign before more fences and alarms were erected around it. “I had to do it,” he recalls. “I just thought, ‘Are they really going to arrest me?’” He hesitates, then chuckles. “Maybe the answer’s yes.” But he got away with it and was permitted to legally return while scouting for “MaXXXine” as he wanted to stage a showdown under the letters. For practical reasons, he was forced to rebuild the sign nearly to scale in Santa Clarita. Even so, the shoot was so tight on time and money that he had just eight hours to film at the duplicate site, including a lunch break and the commute up and down the hill.
“PTSD,” West mutters, flashing back to the hectic pace as he continues down Hollywood Boulevard and turns into the alleyway where Maxine gets menaced by a Buster Keaton clone. Every scene shot on the busy street — and there are a lot of them — had to be completed in four days, with the vintage store fronts mostly erected the morning-of to make sure the sets weren’t destroyed. When the film’s phony video shop went up, West’s phone buzzed with texts from friends who’d happened to drive by. A few asked if he was behind the fake signage; others mistakenly celebrated it as real.
“It’s just a circus at all times and nobody really cares that you’re shooting a movie,” says West, in front of the Hollywood Theatre.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“To turn this all into an X-rated area was a very big project, lots of neon,” West says. As he gestures toward the marquees of the Déjà Vu gentlemen’s club and the Vine Theatre (both seen in “MaXXXine”), a bus pulls up and unloads 50 or so Scientologists in matching navy skirts and trousers who politely ignore his descriptions of sin as they head into the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition. West is also unfazed. “We had to be out here in the chaos of it all. It shows in the movie.”
Some days, he got lucky. West wanted an insert shot of Theda Bara’s star on the Walk of Fame as a nod to Pearl’s pet gator, and, magically, it was just steps from the Déjà Vu. Kevin Bacon, playing one of “MaXXXine’s” heavies, has his own star across the intersection, while Giancarlo Esposito, cast in a memorable role as Maxine’s agent, is embedded three streets to the east.
But this is also the block where an angry driver smashed through the barricades and crashed into a parked car in the middle of filming. The cops who were hired to guard the set had to abandon their posts in pursuit. West and the cast and crew held their positions and finished the scene.
“From making a movie here, I realize it’s difficult to get permits because the neighborhoods just don’t want movies shooting,” West says. “But it’s Hollywood. If there’s ever a reason to be in traffic, it should be because Will Smith is flipping a car in the middle of the street. Every other reason to be stuck in traffic sucks.”
West hopes to stage his next movie in a more controlled environment. He’s 40 pages into that script — “It will not be a trilogy, I assure you of that” — and already imagining the comforts of constructing a set that’s “meticulous and complicated.” He’s challenging himself to surprise audiences and top all three Maxine films combined. “That’s the goal: You put in the reps and you keep getting better.”
“She’s not trying to work for UNICEF,” West says of Goth’s Maxine Minx, “but I’m just trying to put you on her side in the movie so that by the end of ‘MaXXXine,’ you’re like, ‘I’m just glad she made it.’”
(A24)
But for now, he’s focused on getting people to root for the trials and tribulations of his marvelously wicked Maxine Minx. Right after the car crash, West and Goth hustled to film a scene of Maxine strutting the red carpet at Mann’s Chinese.
Eventually, “MaXXXine” itself will debut there too: an ’80s-chic world premiere with Angelyne parked outside in her pink Corvette and attendees dressed like Gordon Gekko and Sunset Strip metal heads. West wears a white suit jacket — “very ‘Miami Vice,’” he says — while his toddler sports “Risky Business”-style sunglasses and charms paparazzi by giving them a let’s-do-lunch-babe finger point.
That was a couple days ago and West is back with us at the Chinese’s autographed concrete, still finding his footing in the surreality of it all. He nods approvingly that the town hasn’t swapped out its shoe prints of classic stars for, well, Shrek.
“The movies aren’t going anywhere, because telling stories is how people communicate,” he says. Tenacious creatives like Maxine and Pearl and yes, even he and Goth, are now part of Hollywood lore. West exhales. “Maybe someday, someone will say, ‘I really like those old movies — like ‘MaXXXine.’”
NEW YORK (OSV News) – As its title suggests, “Scream 7” (Paramount) is the latest extension of a long-lived horror franchise, one that’s currently approaching its 30th anniversary on screen. Since each chapter of this slasher saga has been a bloodsoaked mess, the series’ longevity will strike moviegoers of sense as inexplicable.
Yet the slog continues. While the previous film in the sequence shifted the action from California to New York, this second installment, following a 2022 quasi-reboot, settles on a Midwestern locale and reintroduces us to the series’ original protagonist, Sidney Evans, nee Prescott (Neve Campbell).
Having aged out of the adolescent demographic on whom the various murderers who have donned the Ghostface mask that serves as these films’ dubious trademark over the years seem to prefer to prey, Sidney comes equipped with a teen daughter, Tatum (Isabel May). Will Tatum prove as resourceful in evading the unwanted attentions of Ghostface as Mom has?
On the way to answering that question, a clutch of colorless minor characters fall victim to the killer, who sometimes gets — according to his or her lights — creative. Thus one is quite literally made to spill her guts, while another ends up skewered on a barroom’s pointy beer tap.
Through it all, director Kevin Williamson and his co-writer Guy Busick try to peddle a theme of female empowerment in the face of mortal danger. They also take a stab, as it were, at constructing a plotline about intergenerational family tensions. When not jarring viewers with grisly images, however, they’re only likely to lull them into a stupor.
The film contains excessive gory violence, including disembowelment and impaling, underage drinking, mature topics, a couple of profanities, several milder oaths, pervasive rough and considerable crude language and occasional crass expressions. The OSV News classification is O — morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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Copyright © 2026 OSV News
Entertainment
His underground puppet shows draw massive crowds to L.A. street corner — and fans don’t even know his name
The artist known as Jeffrey’s Human Persona has remained anonymous for nearly 25 years — the same length of time that he has staged guerrilla-style musical puppet shows titled “almighty Opp” on a gritty street corner in Koreatown on the last Saturday of each month. He missed only three shows in the first 19 years of what he refers to as his “services.” However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced him online in 2020 and a family tragedy kept him away from the corner for another few years.
In December he returned live in front of the used car dealership at Western and Elmwood for the first time since the pandemic-induced shutdown, drawing a crowd of several hundred devoted fans. In February he staged his first ticketed event called “Secret Somewhere Services,” which drew close to 50 guests who paid $100 each for the pop-up show at a private residence in the San Fernando Valley where Willie Nelson’s youngest son, Micah, served as the opening act with his art rock project Particle Kid.
The view of the stage from the back of the crowd during January’s “almighty Opp” puppet show, which has returned to Koreatown after a nearly five-year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a family tragedy.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“I missed funerals, I missed Christmases, I missed friends’ birthdays. I never took a vacation,” Jeffrey says of his devotion to his monthly performances during a recent phone interview after his late January show, which also drew a large, excitable crowd of supporters. “I treated it like a knife to my heart.”
“Almighty Opp” is truly about Jeffrey’s heart. Services take place in a specially designed black stage populated with a variety of custom fabricated puppets. These creations are not from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe. At a recent show the ringleader wore a red dirndl with gray knee socks and black ankle boots. His angular head topped with a green felt crown; his toothy mouth a sinister, grimacing gash; his eyes blackened with what looks like charcoal. Other puppets cavorted around him: A tubby, clownish, snowman-like creature that spits water at the crowd; a tall, spindly clown that uses a miniature pump; a weird sock puppet made out of adhesive bandages; a discarded, disheveled baby doll on strings.
One of the main marionettes used in the “almighty Opp” street show. The puppets sing songs written by the show’s creator, an artist who goes by the name of Jeffrey’s Human Persona.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Music is the focal point of each service, with Jeffrey playing guitar and keyboards behind the curtain, singing in a wavering voice reminiscent of Jeff Mangum about the subjects, ideas and feelings that have occupied his mind at various stages of his life. To date, “almighty Opp” has put out 33 albums on Bandcamp featuring songs from services over the years with titles including “Every Day’s the Worst Day,” “Misbegotten Human Beings” and “Bubble Burster.”
“Pretending I had a choice, just as long as we said we did, but now it’s much worse than it seems five years later,” sings a puppet that looks like a bizarro Humpty Dumpty with a huge egg head on a body of red pants during January’s show. “Supporting someone else’s dreams because your good nature’s being used.”
“Almighty Opp” employs a variety of richly detailed, hand-crafted puppets. The show’s creator once worked as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
A common refrain, which almost everyone gathered on the gum-stained sidewalk sings in unison, is, “It’s OK to not be OK.”
Jeffrey loves the spontaneous possibilities of the street corner and what he calls the “stumble upon” nature of the services, but the core audience is a returning one. The nearly 200 people gathered on this January evening just past 9 p.m. stand on stools and chairs in the back and loll on the sidewalk on their elbows in the front. They scream and chant and sing along. They turn and hug one another or shake hands when Jeffrey encourages them to meet their neighbors at different points in the show.
Lars Adams attends an “almighty Opp” show on the last Saturday in January. During the show the crowd is encouraged to turn and greet their neighbors.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“Even though I’m performing, I don’t really consider myself a performer,” Jeffrey says. He also isn’t a busker, although his shows are free community events. And even though there are puppets, he doesn’t call “almighty Opp” a puppet show. He is, he says, “an obsessive maker.” The audience is “just coming along for the ride with me — life’s ride — of how I’m feeling at that time. It’s kind of like a Catholic Church service, where the sermon changes, but the structure of it remains the same.”
Unlike a church service, shows are rowdy and a bit untethered. A bus whooshes by, an unhoused man screams as he walks by with a shopping cart. Jeffrey’s wife, known as Shambles, operates the puppets from behind the curtain, while wearing their 5-year-old daughter, known as Crumbo, in a sling. Two other assistants, called DingDing and Cylo, can also be seen behind the black curtain — their faces hidden in knitted clown masks or shielded by makeup. Jeffrey comes before the crowd toward the end of the show — wearing a white mask and a red hoodie — and asks audience members to give testimonials. People stand up and talk about having been changed by the show over the years.
That’s what happened with Micah Nelson. He came when Jeffrey used to hold mirrors in front of people’s faces and have them watch themselves while the crowd watched them. The sessions were uncomfortably long. Nelson later contacted Jeffrey to say he was covering some of his songs, and that his experience with the mirror had a profound effect on him.
When Nelson introduced Jeffrey at the recent “Secret Somewhere” show, the things he said about Jeffrey made the performer blush. Life, Jeffrey said, has a funny way of coming full circle.
Jeffrey’s Human Persona, who created “almighty Opp” in the early aughts, asks audience members gathered on a Koreatown street corner to give testimonials about the show, which he calls a “service.”
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Jeffrey moved to L.A. from Pittsburgh in 1995 when he was 19. His father bought him the plane ticket after Jeffrey found himself in a bit of a boredom rut with friends and getting into the wrong kind of trouble. He wanted to work in the film industry — he thought L.A. would be like a 1970s Jim Morrison fever dream, but found it not as inspiring. The film business, in which he worked making fantasy art and other fabrications, was not a creative haven, but rather a soul-sucking void.
“I’m tired of making other people’s puppets,” he told a friend one day, and “almighty Opp” was born.
“If you just show up for a paycheck, what are you really doing?” asked Jeffrey during our interview. “I’d rather be a flop and believe in it.”
Children gather at the very front of the stage during January’s “almighty Opp” show, which features original songs on guitar and keyboard. A total of 33 “almighty Opp” albums are available on Bandcamp.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
He made the original puppets and wrote the first “almighty Opp” album in the second-floor apartment where he lived, just a stone’s throw from the corner where he still performs — the corner where he would propose to his wife during a particularly difficult period of his life. During all those years he worked in a variety of creative roles to support himself: for the toy industry; briefly for the Disney Imagineers; and for about eight years as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden for whom he helped fabricate the whizzing future land “Metropolis II,” which resides in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection.
Now that “almighty Opp” is live again, Jeffrey is benefiting from the therapeutic aspects of writing down his emotions and experiences. The “Secret Somewhere Services” will continue once a month, or maybe every two months. Guests can check Instagram for tips on how to score a coveted ticket, which comes with its own handcrafted entrance token and map to the ever-changing private venue. Jeffrey is making big puppets for these performances — one is 7 feet tall — and experimenting with the form of the event.
Still, the street corner will remain the soul of his operation — and the music at the heart of it all.
“It’s all about honesty, and the people who understand it and keep coming, they know that it’s something absolutely real,” he says.
Almighty Opp
Where: Corner of Western and Elmwood avenues, in Koreatown
When: The last Saturday of every month, 9 p.m.
Tickets: Free
Running time: Varies, but usually about an hour.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: March 8th, 2026 / 08:00 PM
THE BRIDE movie poster | ©2026 Warner Bros.
Rating: R
Stars: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Penelope Cruz, Jeannie Berlin, Zlatko Burić
Writer: Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on characters created by Mary Shelley and William Hurlbut and John Balderston
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Release Date: March 6, 2026
“THE BRIDE!” (as with the recent “WUTHERING HEIGHTS,” the quotation marks are part of the title) is awash in homages, and not just the ones we might reasonably expect in a movie that takes its most obvious inspiration from 1935’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.
There’s that, of course, plus its source, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel FRANKENSTEIN; OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, and its sober 1931 film adaptation FRANKENSTEIN. But there are also big nods to wilder takes on the legend, including YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and even movies that have nothing to do with FRANKENSTEIN, like BONNIE AND CLYDE.
Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal casts a wide net in metaphors and ideas and looks. Sometimes “THE BRIDE!” is a comedy, sometimes it’s a crime drama, sometimes it’s a love story, occasionally, it’s even a musical.
Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) narrates the tale to us from beyond the grave. She is haughty and naughty, intoxicated by verbiage and her own literary genius. She is going to tell us a story, she says, that she didn’t even dare imagine while alive.
We’re in 1930s Chicago, where a young escort (also Buckley) is having a really awful evening out at a fancy restaurant with some of her peers and a bunch of crass gangsters. Shelley dubs the woman “Ida” and takes possession of her, causing her to speak and act in ways that get her escorted outside. There she stumbles and takes a fatal fall.
The two goons who were with Ida are happy to describe her tumble as the result of their intentional actions to their horrible gangster boss (Zlatko Burić). Ida was suspected of talking to the cops.
Around the same time, Frankenstein’s creation (Christian Bale) – let’s just call him “Frank,” like everybody else does – comes to Chicago to seek out the groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), whose published works he has read.
Frank wants the doctor to create a companion for him. His appearance is unusual, but the most alarming injuries are covered by clothing, so he’s not as extreme-looking as, say, Boris Karloff in the role. This isn’t about sex, Frank explains when Euphronious asks why he doesn’t just hire a prostitute. After over a century of loneliness, he seeks a soulmate, and he is sure this can only be achieved by reviving a corpse.
So, Euphronious and Frank dig up the grave that turns out to belong to Ida (we never do learn how they know it belongs to a soulmate candidate as opposed to a shot-and-dumped male gangster). Euphronius revives her. Ida remembers how to walk and talk, but not who she is or what happened, so Frank and the doc tell her she’s been in an accident.
Even without Ida’s beauty, Frank is already devoted to the very notion of her. A more accommodating suitor would be hard to find. Frank has another passion, the musical films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker’s brother), a Fred Astaire-like star. Frank imagines himself in the midst of those dance routines, and we get some more within “THE BRIDE!”’s “real” action.
One thing leads to another, Frank and Ida go on the run, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. They are pursued all over the country. Among those seeking them are sad-eyed police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his secretary Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), who’s better at this whole crime-solving business than he is.
It’s all very kaleidoscopic and energetic, occasionally impressive and sometimes very funny. Bening as the frazzled, worldly Euphronious has some great moments. Buckley, currently and justifiably Oscar-nominated leading performance in HAMNET, juggles the very unalike personas of Mary and Ida with impact.
Oddly, Bale underplays Frank. We get that he is trying his hardest not to spook Ida (or anyone else), but it seems like he should have a bit more spark. Cruz, going for a snappy ‘30s working woman, has her own style that works.
But in addition to being entertaining and eye-catching, Gyllenhaal has a message that gets very muddled. This is less because it’s so familiar by now that it feels a little redundant, and more because a crucial part of the set-up collides head-on with the feminist slant.
Ida seeks to be her own person, but she is literally bodily controlled by Mary Shelley, who puts her creation in danger with her outbursts. This may help get Ida out of the clutches of the mob, but it is possession, the aftereffects of which the character understandably finds confusing and upsetting.
If Gyllenhaal wanted to discuss or dramatize the clash between what Mary, as a woman, is doing to this other woman, that would make sense, but it seems we’re just meant to somehow overlook this while being immersed in how men control women. The resulting cognitive dissonance adds another layer to a movie that already has more than it can comfortably service.
Additionally, when Mary has one of her outbursts while inhabiting Ida, the plot comes to a screeching halt until she’s finished. Many viewers will wish Mary would stop declaiming and just let Ida be herself.
“THE BRIDE!” succeeds in being trippy and some of it is memorable. By the end, though, it is more disjointed than even a movie about experiments and a character made up of multiple people’s body parts ought to be.
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