Film Review of the Week

Thriller

The Bride! (15)

Review: Over the end credits of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s audacious reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror Frankenstein and the 1935 film Bride Of Frankenstein, Bobby “Boris” Pickett recounts a macabre tale of vampires, baying hounds and coffin-bangers in his novelty song Monster Mash. “It was a graveyard smash!” booms Pickett. “It caught on in a flash!” The Bride! gleefully smashes skulls and offers flashes of creative brilliance but Gyllenhaal’s achingly stylish experiment in reanimation suffers a similar fate to Frankenstein’s woebegotten creature.

A curious black-and-white framing device introduces Jessie Buckley as writer Shelley, who feels robbed of precious time by her brain tumour. “Darlings, be warned. The sequel is coming!” she whoops, referring to Frankenstein. In 1930s Chicago, desperately lonely monster Frank (Christian Bale) tracks down “mad scientist” Dr Euphronious (Annette Bening) and pleads to find him a companion. “I don’t run a mail order catalogue for fallen women,” chuckles the mad medic. Dr Euphronious realises that Frank means to reanimate a dead woman and she bypasses her Igor-like assistant, Greta (Jeannie Berlin), to assist Frank in digging up a freshly lowered coffin. Inside, they find the body of murdered good time gal Ida (Buckley again).

A huge electrical discharge returns Ida to the land of the living. She is possessed by the spirit of Shelley and becomes a fugitive from the law with Frank, remaining one small step ahead of police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his partner Myrna Mallow (Penelope Cruz), who is repeatedly overlooked by virtue of her sex. As Frank and his bride gain notoriety, their paths cross with dreamy Hollywood matinee idol Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). Meanwhile, menacing crime boss (Zlatko Buric) dispatches two lackeys (John Magaro, Matthew Maher) to permanently silence loose-lipped Ida.

The Bride! elopes from conventional storytelling from the opening scene of Shelley debating with herself whether to spin us a horror yarn or a love story. Stitched and stapled seams between genres are glaringly apparent, and more than once, the film comes apart before our eyes. Hot on the heels of a stellar performance in Hamnet, Buckley is transcendent as a puppet of cruel fate, who is revived by weird science without her consent. She is the electricity that powers Gyllenhaal’s picture through its wild excesses – which include a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-style musical sequence with hundreds of dancers.

Bale shuffles, drools and rages with fierce intensity while the writer-director corrals her husband (Sarsgaard) and brother Jake for notable supporting roles. Cruz and Bening make bigger impacts with their characters’ more detailed back stories. One line of dialogue in Gyllenhaal’s script is distractingly on the nose as the filmmaker draws heavy-handed parallels between Ida’s rejection of a patriarchy that callously discards women like unwanted toy dolls and transformational modern-day movements for meaningful social change. Are you befuddled and mesmerised? Me too.

Animation

Hoppers (U)

Review: Trust is like a dam. When it springs an occasional leak, you patch it up and carry on. So says a benevolent beaver in Hoppers, the latest wildly imaginative computer-animated comedy from the heartstring-pluckers at Pixar. Screenwriter Jesse Andrews conceals a tub-thumping lesson about protecting natural habitats inside a hilarious coming-of-age story glimpsed through the eyes of a 19-year-old eco-activist on a mission to honour the memory of an elderly relative.

The teenage trailblazer is Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda), who nurtured a passion for wildlife from her grandmother (Karen Huie). The pair spent blissful afternoons admiring Mother Nature atop a large stone that overlooks a glade near the old woman’s home in Beaverton. After grandma dies, animals abandon the glade and self-serving Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) confirms plans for his vanity project – the Beaverton Beltway – which will pass through the formerly teeming preserve. “You can’t save that place. Only a beaver can,” biology professor Dr Samantha Fairfax (Kathy Najimy) explains to Mabel, confirming that when a new beaver settles in the glade, other animals will follow and their presence legally prevents Jerry from sending in the bulldozers.

Mabel subsequently learns that Dr Sam, colleague Nisha (Aparna Nancherla) and grad student Conner (Sam Richardson) have secretly developed Hopping technology, which allows humans to port their minds inside life-like robotic critters. Mabel hijacks the system to meld with a mechanised beaver and the teenager embarks on an outlandish odyssey to save the glade by rallying other creatures to her cause, including beaver monarch King George (Bobby Moynihan) and the all-power Animal Council commanded by the Insect Queen (Meryl Streep), whose caterpillar son (Dave Franco) is one pupation shy of megalomania.

Hoppers is another polished gem from the Oscar-winning studio responsible for WALL-E and Inside Out, which engineers high-tech hijinks from a madcap plot that borrows from James Cameron’s blockbusting forays on Pandora. “Woah, you guys. This is like Avatar!” gushes Mabel on cue. Andrews’ script playfully acknowledges its dramatic inspirations, using the bond between Mabel and her grandmother as a touchstone for deeper and timely deliberations about our fraught relationship with a natural world that sustains human life on this resource-plundered planet.

Stylised visuals ramp up cuteness over photorealism but remain impeccably detailed down to the way animal fur interacts with flowing water. Zany set pieces are breathlessly staged, especially the centrepiece of the Animal Council’s most deadly enforcer, shark assassin Diane (Vanessa Bayer), carrying out a contract to “squish” Jerry. I laughed uproariously at visual and verbal gags and drifted into dewy-eyed delirium before director Daniel Chong’s picture delivered the repeated emotional gut punches that have become Pixar’s trademark. Screenwriter Andrews philosophises that it’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something. I’m mad, in the best way, for Hoppers.

Drama

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (15)

Review: Four years after the award-winning TV series Peaky Blinders concluded in sombre fashion, Oscar winner Cillian Murphy reprises his role as crime boss Tommy Shelby in a bruising and violent caper directed by Tom Harper. The Second World War casts a long shadow over this handsomely-crafted big-screen outing, punctuated by clearly telegraphed explosions of violence that spray freshly-spilt blood across the streets of 1940 Birmingham as air raid sirens ring out across the second largest city in the UK.

A direct hit by a German bomb on the Small Arms Factory kills the entire night shift and devastates residents, who openly yearn for the return of Tommy (Murphy) from self-imposed exile. He has been languishing in the countryside, tormented by the ghost of his daughter Ruby as he pens a memoir about his experiences as leader of the Peaky Blinders. In his absence, eldest son Duke (Barry Keoghan) runs amok with a new generation of gang members.

Their reckless disregard for morality lures Duke into the clutches of Nazi sympathiser John Beckett (Tim Roth), who is plotting to flood the British economy with £350 million in forged bank notes. This abrupt injection of cash should destabilise the last remaining western European nation to resist the German advance. Tommy’s sister Ada (Sophie Rundle) visits and implores her brother to return home to save Duke from himself. “I was not father, I was a form of government,” growls Tommy. A traveller (Rebecca Ferguson), who claims to be the twin sister of Duke’s mother Zelda, manages to prick Tommy’s conscience and he eventually returns to Birmingham to extricate his son from the diabolical Nazi plot before more lives are lost. “I promise you, from this bad will come some good,” Tommy pledges aloud to fallen ancestors.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a quietly dignified conclusion to the sprawling saga. Murphy taps into his character’s deep well of grief and regret (“All of us are dead except the one who wants to be dead…”) setting in motion the agonising sacrifices of a second hour that pits criminal fraternities against gun-toting German infiltrators. Visual callbacks to bygone characters from the TV show’s nine-year run, as gravestones and photographs, appeal to ardent fans but don’t alienate newcomers to this unforgiving universe of barbarism and betrayal.

There are also cameos from familiar faces including Stephen Graham as Tommy’s no-nonsense Liverpudlian counterpart, Hayden Stagg. Steven Knight’s script packs surprisingly little plot into 112 minutes but the pedestrian pacing never feels like a slog. Explosive wartime action sequences are staged with aplomb but the biggest fireworks are reserved for confrontations between characters including a skirmish in ankle-high mud between Murphy and Keoghan.