Where to even begin with The Bride!, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal’s second feature holding down those key creative roles evidences none of the thoughtful control and layered emotions of her debut, The Lost Daughter. Instead, it’s all vivid indulgence; audacity itself transmogrified into film narrative. It’s delirious and absurd, a sloshing martini of feminist fury that the director keeps topping off. Of all the films in cinema history that added an exclamation mark to their title, few have justified the punctuation with such gusto.

According to official billing, The Bride! is based off of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. It also owes a debt to the 1935 creature feature Bride of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, and then there are the allusions to movies that range across the tonal landscape from Bonnie and Clyde to Young Frankenstein. Mapping the movie’s genome like that gives a fair sense as to its origins, but doing so also undersells its freewheeling originality. Gyllenhaal directs this movie like it’s a singular opportunity to make something big and bold, so she might as well set off every firework she can get her hands on. It looks great, it sounds great, and it roars like a freight train lifting off the tracks.

The wildness of the movie extends to its very narrative structure, so I’m disinclined to lay out much of the plot. It’s better to by flabbergasted by Gyllenhaal’s choices as they are revealed. For the purposes of writing this out, it suffices to note that Gyllenhaal has set the story in a stylized version of nineteen-thirties America and that the film stars Christian Bale as the creature who resulted from Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments in reanimation and Jessie Buckley in the title role. Alongside them are a cohort of great actors in grand, glorious feats of borderline miscasting: Annette Bening as a maybe-mad scientist, Jeannie Berlin as her goth-adjacent maid and ad hoc lab assistant, Penélope Cruz as a hard-boiled detective whose career is stymied by sexism, Peter Sarsgaard as her dopey partner who serves as a figurehead to their investigations, and John Magaro as a Chicago mob thug. That’s an impressive list that doesn’t even get around to Jake Gyllenhaal, the director’s famous brother, as a movie star who is a point of fixation for Bale’s lumbering brute.

Gyllenhaal wants her film to be everything. It’s a horror story, a manifesto of female empowerment, a fever dream, a deadpan joke, and a paean to excess all in one. The Bride! is too much of a mess to be genuinely great. The film’s expansiveness keeps tripping it up, whether it’s the dead-end subplot of a movement inspired by the bride’s actions or the storyline involving a Chicago mob boss (Zlatko Burić) that should have been excised altogether. It’s maybe no coincidence that both those examples represent stretches where Buckley isn’t on the screen much. Given an almost impossible role (or, really, roles) to play, Buckley throws off every actorly inhibition she might have, performing as if the only thing she needs to do is to listen to the eager instinct inside of her that keeps whispering “more.”

More is the watchword of The Bride! That’s precisely what it delivers, scene by scene. Even in the film’s flawed state, that’s surely preferable to the current Hollywood default of less.