According to the oft-repeated story, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote it on a dare.

In 1816, she joined her lover, Percy, and her friends, Lord Byron and John Palidori, at the Villa Diodati, a mansion near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. There, they each decided to write a separate ghost story. Hers was Frankenstein. She wrote most of it in Bath, England, in 1816, at the age of 18.

Even though Percy encouraged Mary to write Frankenstein and she considered him her equal, her “intellectual soulmate,” this doesn’t mean their relationship was without turbulence. They shared ideas on “Free Love” and considered marriage a form of slavery to both the husband and wife. Following this philosophy, Percy had several infidelities in his life. One, specifically with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. This caused Mary significant distress.

In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, that distress is fueled by Jessie Buckley’s portrayal of Mary Shelley’s spirit. A spirit that seems to exist in some sort of afterlife limbo. She speaks directly to the audience, not only about her anger with Percy, but also about how she plans to possess a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley). Through her possession, she’ll tell a new story, a story filled with feminist rage.

Ida is soon killed, and is brought back to life by Frankenstein’s Monster, A.K.A. Frank (Christian Bale) himself, with the help of a mad scientist, Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening). A few things go wrong (specifically, a murder by Frank), and the couple is on the run from the law. They’re hunted down by two detectives, Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz). Ida and Frank will soon inspire a feminist movement across the United States in their year of 1936.

This is a horror movie, and it does have a certain mood. It is dark and contemplative. But what exactly it is actually contemplating is hard to decipher. The problem comes from the fact that the script seems to be attempting to tell several stories at once. And while these stories are linked story-line-wise, they feel highly disparate due to them rubbing up against each other stylistically. The film struggles to find an identity beyond just yelling at the patriarchal machine that underlies society.

The threads connecting these various plotlines are so thin at best that it is extremely difficult to follow the plot, as the ideas are laid out in a manner that is haphazard and scattered. The film seems less like a story and more like a series of unconnected events, much like a cobbled-together Frankenstein’s Monster.

Additionally, for a movie that has dubbed itself a horror film, the film is decidedly not scary. Like previously mentioned, it can maintain a mood, but never does it instill fear or uneasiness in the viewer. It is horror in name only.

Buckley’s performance is an odd one. She attempts to play both Ida and Shelley, flipping between her characters by flipping between accents. Unfortunately, it’s nigh on impossible to understand Mary’s dialogue. Even with intense concentration, I found myself struggling to parse the words. She has a believable performance emotionally; I simply found myself confused. Bale delivers a solid performance as Frankenstein. It’s easy to feel the sadness of his loneliness.

But good performances do not a good movie make, and the film just can’t seem to find itself. It spends so much of the first act spinning its wheels that it doesn’t seem to know where it is going or how it will get there. The Bride! is creative, but creativity doesn’t always meet the mark.