HORROR; 2hr 6min
STARRING: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz
The oddest couple: Buckley and Bale
“Here comes the motherfucking bride!” Frankenstein author Mary Shelley (Hamnet’s Buckley) cackles from whatever private hell she’s interred in as The Lost Daughter writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s pulpy indulgence gets its groove on.
In1930s Chicago, the singular newly-wed is recently deceased live wire Ida (Buckley again), explosively re-animated as a consort for Dr Frankenstein’s lonely creature (Bale as Frank) by the visionary Dr Cornelia Euphronious (Bening, somehow keeping it real). Cobbled together grotesquerie that he is, romantic cinephile Frank is enchanted by Ida right off the bat, although it begs to be said that his bar is necessarily low: with her peroxided fright wig, blackened lips and tongue, liverish, ink-stamped face and unhinged, undead disposition, Ida is the furthest thing from a shining prize.
The two freaks of nature make quite the heightened sight cutting a jagged swathe through Gyllenhaal’s plushly textured period piece, inspired by director James Whale’s 1935 horrorshow The Bride of Frankenstein. However you read their catalogue of damages — as a cartoonish cautionary tale, a hyperactive horror pastiche in manic search of meaning or a rejuvenated blast from the past — the impossible love story never gives up on itself. Sarsgaard and Cruz weigh in as detectives on the scandalous case, while Maggie G’s brother Jake brings his smoothest moves as a manicured movie star whose musicals give Frank a reason for more or less living. They all come equipped with serious star wattage. But nobody burns more fiercely than Buckley’s combustible lover, torching bridges right and left with the mania of a star-crossed soul.
