“If a monster movie could double as a tragedy, as the original Frankenstein did, what else could it be? That’s the question driving Whale’s sequel, in which the Monster finds his voice, demands a bride, and experiences heartbreak. Bride both holds a distorted mirror up to romance and reworks the ideas driving the original into a kind of dark comedy in which Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) keeps getting drawn back into the monster-making game by his own creation (Boris Karloff) and his mentor Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), whose aspirations to outdo God go beyond even Henry’s.
Elsa Lanchester drew on hissing geese for her depiction of the Bride, helping to turn another example of Jack Pierce’s makeup wizardry into a being of awful beauty. Whale brings the full power of his visual skills to the film, which builds to a fiery climax even sadder than the original’s. Like the best monster movies, Bride proves the dead, the undead, the cursed, and the misbegotten all have something to tell us, and speak in voices that sound much like our own.” –Keith Phipps, Vulture
