After Guillermo del Toro won acclaim last year with a Frankenstein adaptation closer in spirit to Mary Shelley’s novel, actor-director Maggie Gyllenhaal arrives with The Bride!, a radically unorthodox version of the horror monster and his love interest. While Gyllenhaal takes some big risks—imagine the Bride and Frankenstein as a 1930s-era Bonnie and Clyde duo—her film juggles far more than it can handle, coming off more as a hodgepodge of ideas than a cohesive production.

The Bride! juggles noir, romance, crime drama, and even musical numbers while doubling as a meta-narrative on the nature of female characters without agency in unfair romantic quagmires. Nor is it even subtext. The film opens directly with Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) narrating the story as a menacing and omnipresent ghostly figure, introducing a young escort in Chicago she dubs “Ida” (also Buckley) before possessing the woman in the middle of a restaurant with some very corrupt, sleazy clients. As if speaking in Shelley’s voice, the woman’s ramblings come off as brash, disorienting, accusatory, more than a little raunchy, and ultimately bloody. Attempts to slap the possession out of Ida lead to her untimely demise.

It’s into this bizarre, almost fantastical universe that we meet Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), who, as the story often goes, desires companionship. Closer in physical form to Boris Karloff’s counterpart but with ordinary speech patterns, Frank seeks out a contemporary mad scientist, Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), whom he believes can “reinvigorate” a potential female lover from dead body parts. The body they discover happens to be Ida’s, but upon reviving her corpse, the results are not what Frank expected. Sporting frizzy blonde curls and an ink-black mark on her right cheek, this Bride is at once amnesic and off-kilter, as if the minds of Ida and Shelley are locked inside together. Yet Frank is nonetheless captivated by her beauty. A night on the town, however, results in a bloody affair with two violent assailants, forcing the duo to go on the run and avoid a rising angry mob—a scenario, Frank admits, he’s dealt with in the past.

Where most Bride of Frankenstein stories prioritize Frank’s obsession, The Bride! is as much about its titular heroine’s quest for identity in this relationship. True, Frank is a soft-spoken, occasionally violent hopeless romantic, not to mention a movie lover enamored with the Gene Kelly–inspired movie star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal); he even imagines himself performing Reed’s song-and-dance numbers in a clever tribute to Young Frankenstein. But it’s Buckley’s take on the Bride that holds your interest. Partially because the whole “possessed and reanimated” angle leaves her switching between a Chicago broad and British-tinted rambling, she and Bale deliver performances that veer between playfully crazy and tragically gothic. Their cross-country journey is where the movie feels the most fully developed.

Disappointingly, it’s everything else surrounding the Bride and Frank that weighs The Bride! down. Rather than focus intimately on her co-leads, Gyllenhaal fills this world with characters and subplots that end up muddying the waters. You have two detectives (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz) chasing after the Bride, one of whom has ties to her past while the other struggles to establish herself in male-dominated law enforcement. There’s also a grotesque mobster (Zlatko Burić) who sends his own goons to kill the Bride, as well as hints of a violent #MeToo-inspired uprising against abusive men whose perpetrators don the Bride’s cheek mark as a calling card. This is not to mention scenes where characters spontaneously burst into song-and-dance routines.

These endless dramatic strands come across as more overwrought than insightful, amplifying the crazy rather than grounding it. Further complicating matters is the role Shelley herself plays, doubling as both a literal part of the Bride’s psyche and a meta-influencer over the film’s strangest moments. Her presence raises questions over what is real or exaggerated. The tone goes dark one moment, horny the next, and straight-up camp somewhere in between. The Bride! certainly isn’t ashamed of being bold and different, yet the payoff for these acts of rebelliousness doesn’t always match its ambition.

Perhaps there is something here for fans of macabre outsiders daring to go against the grain of typical movie structure without a care in the world. But in terms of building a tight monster movie experience, this one is sadly missing some killer instinct.