With her audacious sophomore feature “The Bride!” writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal offers a topical-ish take on “Bride of Frankenstein”: what if “the Joker” was “brat”? (To borrow Charli XCX’s ineffable description of a rebellious party girl personality.)

Gyllenhaal brings this modern concept to the 91-year-old James Whale film (his sequel to “Frankenstein”), in which Elsa Lanchester made the Bride of Frankenstein an icon with her stripy electrified 'do. But Gyllenhaal also pays homage to the era that birthed our Bride, and locates her as a feminist symbol in both her past and our present.

Set in 1936, Gyllenhaal’s future Bride is drunken flapper Ida (Jessie Buckley), a gangster’s moll who has run afoul of Chicago mobster Vito Lupino (Zlatko Buric). Ida’s at the end of her run, puking up oysters on the trousers of mob heavies while tormented by intrusive thoughts. But when she meets her demise and ends up in a pauper’s grave, that’s just the beginning of her story.

Ida is plucked from the dirt by Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), who has traveled to Chicago in search of a wife to assuage his loneliness. He has sought out the expertise of Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) to bring life to his love, but when they lay out beautiful Ida on the slab and zap her back to life, neither were expecting a dame with such spark.

Clad in orange satin, with a fried blond bob and an inkblot of coughed-up reanimating fluid smeared across her face, our Bride cuts a distinctive figure with her new lease on life. She and her Monster are hard to miss as they embark on a “Bonnie and Clyde” crime spree that involves going to a lot of movies and killing a lot of cops.

They’re a real film bro boyfriend/riot grrl girlfriend pair, as the Monster is obsessed with the films of a Fred Astaire-type movie star, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), and the Bride can’t help but start a feminist revolution wherever she goes. Soon packs of copycat girls are aping her looks and posing provocatively with Tommy guns, while a pair of Chicago detectives (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz) are hot on their heels in pursuit.

As in Whale’s 1935 film, star Buckley pulls double duty as Lanchester did, playing both “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley in a framing device and the reanimated Bride. Buckley’s Shelley bellows and chortles in black-and-white shadows, as a sort of “brain attack” or “tumor” intruding on the consciousness of Ida/the Bride, but, unfortunately, like the rest of the film, her ramblings don’t make much sense.

“The Bride!” might be edgy, evocative and filled with sleazy goth vibes, but Gyllenhaal relies on mood, atmosphere and provocative imagery to the detriment of the overall storytelling, which borders on the incoherent. The film is handsomely shot by Lawrence Sher (“Joker”), with a camera that never stops moving, and a surgically skillful edit by Dylan Tichenor (“Boogie Nights”) knits it all together within every scene, but the narrative itself feels as dismembered and sewn back together as one of Frankenstein’s monstrous creations.

All exposition is stripped out of the first half of the film and then plopped into the second, with reveals that land with a splat, because by the time we’re delivered pertinent information, we couldn’t care less. The constant and obvious references to other Frankenstein movies, MGM musicals and real Hollywood figures like Ida Lupino are period-specific but ultimately distracting. Buckley gives it her all, dancing, singing and switching from Chicago to English accents and back again, but her whirling dervish performance has no place to land.

The Bride spends the whole film trying to find her name, and when she finally lands on “the Bride” that doesn’t feel right either. There’s no sense of who she is, any vulnerability, or real character to connect to. But as she delivers ham-fisted feminist speeches and poses provocatively, we come to realize that she’s nothing more than a symbol, a representation of “female rage” (a phrase she growls and shouts repeatedly in case we didn’t pick that up).

Buckley (and Gyllenhaal) deliver this all with a sense of passion and effort, but it all starts to feel like the early scene where the Bride is reanimated and spews gibberish until her brain reorients itself. There’s an emotional, emphatic expression of fragments of thoughts and thematically related ideas, but nothing sticks. The film almost strings a sentence together but then spins away into another dance sequence, movie reference, or shriek in the night.

Made up of stylish pastiche, girl power slogans and one go-for-broke performance, “The Bride!,” like her Monster, isn’t much more than an assemblage of parts, and the slipperiness of time, place and character leaves the film unmoored and unrooted. Here comes “The Bride!” — unfortunately, she’s brain dead.

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'THE BRIDE!

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong/bloody violent content, sexual content/nudity and language)

Running time: 2:06

How to watch: In theaters March 6

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