The Bride! is that rare beast: a total misfire from a long list of artists so talented and well regarded that they should, like the film they are in, be festooned with an exclamation point or two. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s follow-up to the stunning (but much smaller) The Lost Daughter simply contains way too many tones, ideas, and approaches to ever work, and many of these are at war with each other. The Bride! is a love story and a rewrite of the Frankenstein myth and an action film and a murder mystery and a crime comedy and a rejoinder to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. Its vision of Prohibition-era Chicago is Chicago and Manhattan and Weimar Berlin. The film is built around a scaffolding of over-the-top homages to other films, causing it to career off one stylistic cliff after another. During one sequence in a dance hall, I wrote in my notebook, “Oh, it’s like ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ in Young Frankenstein.” Five seconds later, the big band on-screen struck up “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Yet for all this wild, sometimes deliberate tastelessness, The Bride! also wants to be a serious meditation on love, female messiness, and the limits put on women’s lives. It aims to be both a camp classic—the end credits music is, of course, “The Monster Mash”—and a serious feminist work. As a result, it comes across like Joan Crawford pausing partway through Johnny Guitar to give America Ferrera’s speech from Barbie.

Embodying this fascinating patchwork of ideas good and bad is the Irish actress Jessie Buckley, who will soon find herself in the odd position of winning an Oscar for a serious prestige movie while she is also in multiplexes with the most controversial performance of her career thus far. As the titular Bride(!), Buckley is tasked with playing multiple roles, sometimes simultaneously. She begins the film as the ghost of Mary Shelley, informing the viewer—in what can be described only as an unfortunate act of hubris on Gyllenhaal’s part—that what we are about to see is the story Shelley would’ve told if she had only had the guts and not died of brain cancer. Her performance is high camp, like something out of a Hammer horror film, complete with overenunciated consonants, wicked smiles, and the excavation of Buckley’s lower vocal register. She next appears as Ida, a young call girl for the Chicago mob. Before too long, Ida is possessed by Mary Shelley, and Buckley switches on a dime from good-time gal to enraged Fury, spouting Shakespearean torrents of verbiage and puns. After she is killed and resurrected, she plays Ida again, but this time broken and amnesiac, with bits of Shelley breaking through without warning. At another point, she channels Marlene Dietrich for reasons I cannot now recall.

It’s a huge performance, as massive and maximalist as anything in Nicolas Cage’s filmography. And while her work in the film is almost certain to inspire debates, I find it incredibly brave. Buckley has built the kind of career that would allow her to go on dancing on the wild edge of tasteful prestige movies, but in The Bride!, she is so committed to the task at hand that she delivers a performance that transcends petty questions of good or bad. Perhaps most impressively, in The Bride!, Buckley also exists beyond any sense of being embarrassed about her work.

Acting is the most human of art forms, the one that, via imagination, experience, language, and the body, portrays and confronts the human condition in all its varieties. As being a human being is often mortifying, acting is thus also one of the most embarrassing things a person could possibly do. There’s a reason why we call overly sincere people theater kids. What could be worse than actually wanting attention in a world where public speaking frequently tops lists of people’s worst fears? The secret is: A lot of actors are afraid of public speaking too. That’s why we have the actor’s nightmare, a dream in which you are going to perform in a play but realize at the last minute that you do not know your lines, nor do you remember rehearsing it. The last time I had this dream, I was unable to learn the script because someone kept knocking at my door to tell me that the late Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wanted to speak to me. I went out to see her. She said hello, and I began uncontrollably weeping. Embarrassing!

Acting holds way more potential for humiliation than either public speaking or telling someone your dreams. You’re pretending to be other people for a living. But it is only in letting go of this embarrassment that you can begin to pretend so well that your lies tell the truth, and other people forget that you’re pretending. You appear to be simply living within the world of the script. There’s a word for this, and because it was coined by Konstantin Stanislavski, it’s a Russian word: perezhivanie. It means “experiencing” (or perhaps “reexperiencing”). It’s the acting version of the flow state, or being in the zone—it is the moment when the actor and character meet, the self and self-consciousness fall away, and the actor is fully in tune with the moment. Almost every major doctrinal debate in acting in the past century has been over how to most reliably enable actors to reach this state, whether that’s using their own life experiences and memories (Method acting), learning how to radically be in the moment (the Meisner technique), relying on imagination, textual analysis, and research (the Adler technique), or living as your character full time, a technique that doesn’t really have a name but is usually associated with Daniel Day-Lewis.

Perezhivanie is so powerful to witness because we get to watch an actor transcend themselves. As a self can be a burdensome fardel to bear, this transcendence holds out hope that we mortals sitting in the audience could be graced with a similar moment. Through art, we could be taken out of ourselves and into something more mysterious, and brilliant, and beautiful, and strange. But the routes one takes to get there are often, you guessed it, pretty embarrassing. Or, as Harvey Keitel once told the New York Times of being an actor: “We do some things that might be construed as voodoo, but nevertheless it gets results.”

Few actors get these results like Jessie Buckley. I have rarely seen an actor so easily able to experience, to render a character’s messy humanity in a way that is still coherent and controlled, as if she were at once a deep-sea diver plumbing the unconscious and the boat waiting to take them back ashore. As her recent awards haul for Hamnet shows, I’m not the only one who feels this way. Every actor I talk to gets a little glassy-eyed when her name comes up; the words queen and goddess tend to find their way into the conversation. She is clearly one of the greatest actors (if not the greatest actor) of her generation, one who has demonstrated versatility while operating at a consistently high level. After receiving her start as a runner-up on a reality show judged by Andrew Lloyd Webber, she’s gone on to appear in musical theater, in Shakespeare, in films large and small. In every one of these roles, her performances not only fit the character exactly; they make those characters so fully her own that it’s hard to picture anyone else playing them.

This is true even when she plays a role that’s hundreds of years old, as she did in the National Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet. Filmed over 17 days in the National during lockdown, and available to stream over National Theatre Live, the film—and Buckley’s performance—is a revelation. Not only does she render the verse with the felicity of everyday speech, but she finds layer upon layer with the role. Her Juliet begins as the cleverest person in her household, trying to reason her way through a world that doesn’t make much sense. As she loses all control—first through falling in love, then through being betrothed to her cousin against her will—a profound loneliness and desperation seeps in drip by drip until her suicide seems not only inevitable but understandable. Her chemistry with co-star Josh O’Connor is also off the charts.

The secret to Buckley’s performances is a feral quality that seems to come from some other dimension. In Hamnet, Buckley first appears asleep in the roots of a gigantic tree like a lost dryad. She is a creature of nature, in tune with the forest and its spirits, the opposite of her husband, Will Shakespeare, a creature of mind and word. Even as they are married, and have children, and lose one of them to the plague and then each other to grief, there is a part of Buckley’s Agnes that seems to be always dwelling in the forest, away from civilization. She cannot be tamed; she can only contain herself for a while if she chooses to.

In The Lost Daughter, for which she earned her first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress, she brings a similar sense of barely restrained unruliness to the role of Leda, a woman about to blow up her life and marriage because she has fallen in love with an older academic. While playing Leda, Buckley seems to be rafting down the river of the character rather than guiding where the currents take her. In the four years since The Lost Daughter’s release, we’ve had any number of films about mothers and wives transgressing, or turning monstrous. But for all the pyrotechnics of Poor Things or Die My Love or Nightbitch or If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, few scenes feel as truly daring, hypnotic, and troubling as the sequence in The Lost Daughter when Buckley languidly masturbates while her children call to her from the next room. There’s no judgment in her performance, just a simple, primal portrayal of a woman slamming up against the walls of the domestic life she thought she wanted, and yearning to break through them.

As an audience member, part of what makes perezhivanie so spellbinding are moments like these, when it feels as if the actor is discovering the character alongside you. Buckley has done this enough times, in enough different roles, that when I left the critics’ screening of The Bride!, I kept trying to figure out who her performance reminded me of. Who else had I seen do similar hairpin turns between radically different voices and modes of expression, all enclosed within the same character? Then I realized I was thinking about the wonderful unknown actor I had seen channel Pauline Kael in a bravura moment of Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. And then it hit me: The female lead in I’m Thinking of Ending Things was also Jessie Buckley.

Buckley’s route to perezhivanie runs through a now-trendy technique, based in both Jungian psychology and the Method, that is called “dream work” or, somewhat ominously, “the Way” (embarrassing!). When doing dream work, actors get in touch with the subconscious of themselves and their characters through fantasy and dreams. A common practice is to write a letter to your own subconscious, asking it to bring you a dream that will connect you to the character and their struggles. The most prominent current practitioner of dream work, and Buckley’s acting coach, is Kim Gillingham. The New York Times visited her classes in 2009 and found any number of exercises that might be easy to make fun of: people confessing their darkest fears to a yoga mat, to breathing out “like an old horse,” to purposefully journeying to the psychic place they absolutely did not want to go to, to acting out one another’s dreams. Great quantities of sobbing regularly ensued. Buckley believes enough in this work that she brought it to director Chloé Zhao, who also worked with Gillingham on the film. As Zhao told the Times, she employed other nonrational techniques to create a kind of collective unconscious on set:

In the morning, [Buckley] would do fever writing about her dreams and then would pick some music, and as soon as I got to set, I would put the music on repeat so the whole set was harmonized to the vibration she wanted. Other than a conversation about which setup we want to do, we just go in there and do it. When she let out that very guttural scream of grief [in the scene of Hamnet’s death], that was not planned. But I believe it didn’t just come from her; it came from the collective.

At its worst, this kind of impulsive, unconscious-driven work can feel indulgent, aimless, or erratic. But Buckley, who learned three instruments as a child and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, has the technical chops to remain grounded, even while venturing out into parts unknown. That unmapped territory is where true art comes from. It’s the realm beyond the limits of the rational, the part of human experience that cannot be replicated by large language models, because it cannot be controlled by the conscious mind. Stanislavski called it the superconscious. The goal of his techniques was to conjure the superconscious, but he always recognized that the best one could do is serve up some bait to lure the hidden creative soul out of its cave. One cannot simply charge directly in and rouse this spirit. It can only be approached indirectly, and without fear or shame. Sometimes, to get results, you need a little voodoo.