It is the fate of the Universal Monster to be misunderstood. Technically speaking, the Bride of Frankenstein figure from Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, arriving on HBO Max after a vanishingly brief theatrical run, isn’t even a Universal Monster; unlike recent contemporary and Universal-made takes on The Invisible Man and Wolf Man, this movie hails from Warner Bros. Yet it does fit in well with the aforementioned 2020s-era monsters, with the feminist angle of the former and the audience-alienating strangeness of the latter.

For that matter, critics, too, seemed put off by The Bride!, some damning it with the weirdly uniform praise of calling it a “big swing” (the “…and a miss” seems to be left euphemistically alone), others outright throwing up their hands. Gyllenhaal may not have done herself any favors by offhanding in interviews that she came to the Bride, a title character from James Whale’s seminal 1935 horror sequel, through seeing her in someone’s tattoo, later to discover that the actual character doesn’t have a ton of screentime in the film itself, or any actual spoken lines. There’s arguably a forest-for-the-trees quality to implying that a pioneering queer director like Whale didn’t do enough to, you know, pass the Bechdel Test or whatever.

Yet regardless of how the writer-director found her way into a cracked remake of Bride of Frankenstein, you can’t accuse her of ignoring that text; the movie’s single weirdest idea comes straight from an oft-forgotten detail from the Whale film. Bride of Frankenstein opens with Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester, double-cast but single-credited; she’s also the “Monster’s Mate,” listed only as “?” in the final roll), explaining to her husband Percy and the poet Lord Byron that she has more to tell about the doctor and his creature. (The material is only loosely inspired by Shelley’s Frankenstein, where the Creature demands a mate but his creators do not oblige.)

Correspondingly, The Bride! opens with the ghost of Mary Shelley (Oscar winner Jessie Buckley) explaining from a purgatorial space that she wanted to tell another story, but was prevented by her death. She then attempts to possess Ida (also Buckley), a mob moll in 1930s Chicago, causing erratic behavior in Ida, and ultimately her death. Later, Ida’s corpse is revived by a doctor (Annette Bening) attempting to assuage the loneliness of the wandering creature who has taken the name Frankenstein (Christian Bale), Frank for short. Ida’s memories are scrambled: by her possession, by the lies Frank tells her about their relationship, and by remnants of her actual past. The two undead creatures then go on a movie-drunk, Bonnie and Clyde-ish rampage. They do some light rampaging.

It’s a defiantly weird premise that serves as a gateway to a defiantly weird Buckley performance, full of showy outbursts, clipped accent work ping-ponging somewhere in the vicinity of Katharine Hepburn and Harley Quinn, and go-for-broke theater-kid showoff energy to match her flamboyant ink-splatter mouth tat (it’s actually supposed to be burnt-on gunk from her revival). She can be a lot to take. But there’s something endearing about Buckley’s unruliness, and Bale matches her freak in a lower key.

The idea that Frank has been wandering the world for decades feels very much in keeping with the lower-rent Frankenstein sequels that followed Bride, where the monster would inevitably appear to burned or buried or otherwise annihilated at the end of one film, only to rise and lurch ever-forward at the beginning of the next. It was shameless sequel extending of the 1930s and ’40s variety, chased with a rough sort of lonely poetry that Bale further fleshes out here. His Frank is surprisingly soulful, alight with joy when he watches his favorite movie star (Jake Gyllenhaal doing a little favor for his sister) up on the silver screen. The idea of Frankenstein’s Monster wandering around long enough to eventually become a habitual solo moviegoer is irresistible, and there’s a free-associative gleefulness in the cross-referencing of Bride of Frankenstein with other movies from the era in which it was made (like black-and-musicals and, in a misguided cop plot, noir) and other movies set in that era (like Bonnie and Clyde). Gyllenhaal also arranges a shout-out to the Mel Brooks masterpiece Young Frankenstein, as loud as it is hilarious. Less hilarious is a faintly baffling plot involving Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz on the couple’s trail; it may be one bizarre subplot too many.

If it’s all stitched together like, well, you know, the stitchwork itself is often gorgeous: costumes, sets, bits of musical numbers that looked great on IMAX screens for the brief window of time during which The Bride! played there. Now destined to be discovered (if at all) as a streaming curio, Gyllenhaal’s film will surprise some viewers with how light on its feet it ultimately feels, even when it occasionally gets heavy in the hands. (The undead Ida does literally scream “me too!” at one point.) Monster-movie fans in particular should get a kick out of what Gyllenhaal is up to here: By making the Bride into the main character, she also, perhaps unexpectedly, jumps off into a love story that Bride of Frankenstein pointedly avoided. The earlier movie ends with the “mate” rejecting the creature, who isn’t all that interested in her romantically, anyway. “We belong dead,” he famously tells her.

Here, what bonds the two fringe-dwelling characters is a very monster-y concept. Universal Monster stories tend to be about characters occupying an alienating middle ground between humanity and something darker and more feral: the wolf-man hybrid, the humanoid form disguising the undead evil of Dracula, the scientist whose invisibility erases his physical form and immediately turns him mad with fantastical power, and so on. The monsters of the Frankenstein series, made with spare parts from dead humans, are arguably the most innocent form of this in-between state, victims of circumstance yearning for some kind of release, into either humanity or oblivion. The Bride! is largely about these monstrous yet recognizably human figures struggling with self-expression; what’s more human than that? Frank admires a song-and-dance man at the movies; Ida’s words tumble over themselves as she attempts to sing, dance, and sloganeer with abandon; Mary Shelley attempts to have her say from somewhere inside Ida’s body, having written a masterpiece apparently not

These interjections can be weird or embarrassing, and Gyllenhaal is right there with her actors, ready and willing to risk her dignity over this highly personal project. Beyond the “big swing” ambition of it all, though, The Bride! becomes a touching counter-narrative to the tragic B-movie grandeur of so many Universal Monster pictures. Here is a story that gives its monsters the space to consider that maybe they do not, in fact, belong dead. Whatever else you can say about it, Gyllenhaal’s movie is most definitely alive.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream The Bride! on HBO Max