Review: Decadent and disorderly, 'The Bride!' is a spectacular beast rampaging out of control

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“The Bride!” is a maniacal assemblage of ’30s musicals, ’40s noirs, 19th century literature and 21st century ideology.Every wacky second, you’re well aware how perilously close it is to falling apart at the seams.

This spiritual sequel to “Frankenstein” is a romantic tale of obsession, possession and fantasy — adjectives that also apply to its filmmaker, Maggie Gyllenhaal, who expends massive quantities of energy jolting it to life.She succeeds by the skin of her teeth.The monster’s missus comes with as much narrative anticipation as Godot.

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel has Dr.Frankenstein bicker with his creature about her potential existence before deciding against it in fear that “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate.” Over a hundred years later, the debate continued, raging through nearly all of 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein” which finally introduces Elsa Lanchester and her sky-high bouffant five minutes before the end credits, just enough time for her to make an iconic impression before her arranged husband blows them both to smithereens.

Boris Karloff laments, “She hate me.” Lanchester’s Bride never speaks and quite possibly never knows what is happening to her at all.Gyllenhaal’s empowerment story, meanwhile, feels like an unhinged scream.Jessie Buckley (who starred in Gyllenhaal’s debut, “The Lost Daughter”) tackles the dual roles of the Bride and Shelley, a hat tip to Lanchester, who did the same thing.

The action starts in Shelley’s grave where she’s spent centuries seething about the sequel she never dared to write, then cuts to an American nightclub, where her spirit suddenly possesses a drunken strumpet named Ida (Buckley) — not smoothly but herky-jerky, with the angry author causing this gangster’s moll to go on the fritz.Her accent alternates mid-sentence from city gal to snidely Bri...