There is a moment early in The Bride! when Jessie Buckley, playing Mary Shelley as a cackling, black-tongued aristocratic hellion narrating her own forbidden story from the beyond, leans into the camera and promises the audience a tale of murder, resurrection, sex, and crime. It is a moment of pure theatrical electricity. The film never quite matches it again but the fact that it gets close, repeatedly and unexpectedly, is what makes Maggie Gyllenhaal's wildly ambitious second feature something worth arguing about rather than dismissing.

Set in 1930s Chicago, the film follows Frank — Frankenstein's monster, played by Christian Bale — who arrives in the city battered and lonely, seeking a companion. He enlists Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening) to reanimate Ida (Buckley), a young woman murdered by her gangster boyfriend after she threatened to expose him. What emerges from the operating table is not Ida, not entirely, but something new: a woman with no memory, unlimited fury, and no interest in being anyone's bride on anyone's terms. A cross-country chase, an accidental crime spree, and a twisted love story follow.

This is one of Christian Bale's best performances since Vice. Frank is physically enormous and emotionally exposed — a creature of total vulnerability wearing the exterior of a monster — and Bale plays him with a tenderness and a specificity that should not work as well as it does. He brings Boris Karloff's lumbering sadness without the camp, and in the film's quieter scenes, particularly those where Frank simply tries to understand what it means to want something and be refused it, he is genuinely moving.

But the film belongs to Jessie Buckley. Playing three versions of the same woman — Mary Shelley, Ida, and the Bride — she gives a performance of total, fearless commitment. The role is wild in ways that are difficult to describe without underselling: she spits black goo, declaims Melville while fleeing the police, and moves through the film in a state of what-the-hell fury that recalled Emma Stone in Poor Things — the same quality of an actor building something genuinely new from scratch, without a safety net, with no apparent concern for whether it is likeable. Where Stone charted Bella Baxter's evolution through physical precision, Buckley scorches through Ida's resurrection with pure vocal and physical intensity. It is a mesmerising performance in a film that does not always deserve it.

The effort Maggie Gyllenhaal has poured into this film is visible in every frame. Lawrence Sher's cinematography is gorgeous, the black-and-white framing device is genuinely beautiful, and the 1930s Chicago production design is immaculate. Hildur Guðnadóttir's score is excellent. The ambition is real and the vision is coherent: this is a feminist Frankenstein fable about women who are created to serve and choose not to.

The problem is that the film is very slow. Scenes that should crackle have a murky, static quality that drains their energy. Gyllenhaal has so much on her mind — the gangster plot, the Mary Shelley framing device, the love story, the feminist allegory, the horror elements, the crime spree road movie — that individual threads are left half-baked. The supporting cast, which on paper is extraordinary (Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening, Peter Sarsgaard, Jake Gyllenhaal), is almost entirely wasted. Cruz, Bening and Sarsgaard register barely at all. These are not small actors failing — they are simply given nothing to do.

The film is a strong contender for an Oscar nomination for Hair and Makeup. The transformation work on Bale and Buckley is extraordinary, intricate, practical, and unlike anything in recent genre cinema.