Why is every big movie now so excessive and exhausting?

If I were an existentialist philosopher – Jean-Paul Bleasdale, perhaps – I would call my first book Excess and Exhaustion. The title sums up these last few years as we’re ping-ponged from war to war, off-ramp to Overton Window, QAnon to looksmaxxing, pandemic to panacea as if Marty Supreme were battering us in one of his novelty matches. These days, th3 the only break I take from doomscrolling is the time it takes me to write a social media post whinging about how exhausted I am.

I felt a similar sense of hyperactive despair when I slouched out of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride last week. The film is like someone stuffed a Christmas tree in a washing machine, put it on the turbo spin cycle and then shoved the washing machine out of the window of a high-rise building attached to a long power cord. Like that metaphor, it did a lot.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Jessie Buckley) is a black and white ghost who breaks into the head of Ida (again Jessie Buckley), who is a kind of gangster’s moll in Chicago. Possessed by MWS’s ghost, Ida kicks off and gets herself killed in the process via a chiropractic fall down the stairs.

Meanwhile, Frank/enstein (Christopher Bale) rocks up to Dr Euphronious (a gurning Annette Bening), with the request that she settle his loneliness by creating a female companion for him. Plot convenience guides them to Ida’s recently dug grave, and she’s brought back to life as Penny, a frizz haired Cruella DeVille, spewing black ink and punk energy.

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The film is fervid in its reclaiming, retooling, reimagining and resurrecting. Penelope Cruz and Peter Sarsgaard turn up as a Thin Man pair of police detectives; there’s a song-and-dance routine out of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein; Jake Gyllenhaal has a cameo as Ronnie Reed, a depression-era Fred Astaire-style actor; Frank imagines himself Purple Rose of Cairo-ing into Ronnie’s pictures.

Add to this a feminist revolution which Penny inspires Joker-style, and a Bonnie and Clyde/Gun Crazy lovers-on-the-lam subplot/plot/I don’t know what. You see what I mean about excess and exhaustion?

The film itself can’t keep up with its own story. The couple go to Niagara Falls for NO REASON. At one point they are pulled over by the cops and after a shoot out decide to escape on foot rather than drive, because… what? It was a nice day? They wanted to get their steps in?

And there are so many scenes in the film where Ida/Penny/Mary points a gun at people. Guns play a remarkably promiscuous role in the film, as they do in the American imagination and American films. It’s like someone googled Chekhov but never bothered to read any.

The excess is exhausting. Wuthering Heights was the same. I remember when Sofia Coppola made Marie Antoinette and there was a fuck-you freshness to the idea of a bubblegum version of Barry Lyndon, but this is a bubblegum version of bubblegum.

I’d add Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another to the naughty step, which is the most political film I’ve ever seen which possesses absolutely no political content. Not a single political idea. We get scenes of incredible activity, slogans and language, rituals and names, but nothing coherent emerges.

Not that we care. We feel like we’ve been in a “political film” machine; a rollercoaster ride – quite literally with that final car chase – of radical chic and great tunes, where once more resolution can only come with people pointing guns at each other.

If there’s one political idea all these films seem to have, it’s the NRA-endorsed slogan: the answer to a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. Even a child.

All of these films are entertaining. And they’re also meme-machines that Tik-Tok along for their running, staggering, jumping-time until you exit the cinema.baffled, bemused, and ready for bed.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s film isn’t engaged with reality and politics in the way, say, The Secret Agent is. For all the bone-cracking and head-stomping of The Bride, there’s no instance of suffering the way there is in Sirât.

There’s some spittle rich sex, but neither The Bride or Wuthering Heights has anything as subversive and frankly disturbing as in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. I know some people found that film objectionable, but at least there was something there to object to.

Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee likewise gives us a mad musical about the Shakers which does a good job of transposing the ecstasy of religious enthusiasm into the frenzy of a musical, while at the same time suggesting that the religion really comes from the sado-masochistic sex urges Amanda Seyfried’s Ann has decided to repress. On the positive side though, it is original. Mad, yes. But original.

Wuthering Heights and The Bride feel algebraic in their construction. You can hear the “x meets y” being pitched. Emily Bronte meets Baz Luhrmann. Young Frankenstein meets Joker. I swear the pitch for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was: “Frankenstein meets Wolverine.”

It’s the maximalist whatever. Throw everything at the screen and whatever sticks will do. Even if you die of boredom or a heart attack, the film will zap you back to life – whether you want it to or not.

John Bleasdale’s novel Connery is out now, published by Plumeria