OVERVIEW
Based on James Whale’s 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, which expanded on Mary Shelley’s novel and gave the creature a companion (for a few minutes), Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! pushes the idea further by centering the movie on her. Here, the Bride was once Ida, an escort tied to the mob world in 1936 Chicago, murdered by her boyfriend. Frankenstein’s monster finds her body and, after roaming alone for over a century, asks Dr. Euphronious to revive her so she can be his bride. Once she wakes up, Ida has no memory of her past life, but she knows one thing: she has no interest in simply being “the bride.”
BACKGROUND
This is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second feature and her second collaboration with Jessie Buckley after The Lost Daughter, which earned Buckley her first Oscar nomination. After seeing a tattoo of Elsa Lanchester’s Bride and revisiting James Whale’s 1935 film, Gyllenhaal realized the character barely appears and never speaks, and felt compelled to give her a voice. The film has major talent attached across the board, but the production appears to have been bumpy, with composer changes in post-production (always a bad sign), test screenings, reshoots, and release date shifts.
THE REVIEW
People love to call a messy movie “a Frankenstein,” but The Bride! earns the title the old-fashioned way, assembling itself from mismatched parts that never quite settle into a single creature. You can feel it straining to be many things at once, as if every big idea had to stay in the cut even when it pulls against the others. The film keeps reminding you of other films instead of finding a voice of its own, like Joker: Folie à Deux and Suicide Squad dressed in Tim Burton’s visual style and pushed into Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” idea of “daring.” It comes alive only in brief jolts, like a body twitching on the table before going still again.
The opening sets the tone for that frustration. Mary Shelley, played by Jessie Buckley, speaks from the afterlife and insists that neither she nor the world was ready for what she truly meant to say about the Bride of Frankenstein, a bold claim the film cannot meet (for all its faults, Fennell at least did not announce that Brontë needed fixing). We are then dropped into Ida’s introduction in choppy, awkwardly staged scenes shot in relentless close-ups, with Buckley switching to Ida and getting possessed by Mary’s spirit within seconds. She plays these early moments like she is still in a West End Cabaret ensemble, which might work on stage, but becomes too much in Gyllenhaal’s in-your-face framing. It is off-putting, and the movie spends much of its runtime trying to recover.
It is hard to blame Buckley when she is playing what the script demands, including broad, showy gestures that keep reminding you there is an actress performing a part. But both her and the film’s take on Ida end up feeling surface-level. There is anger, loudly expressed, but little sense of tragedy, exhaustion, or hopelessness underneath it. It is all made worse by the baffling choice to have a pivotal part of her arc narrated by another character while she is not even on screen. It removes the weight from her journey and leaves Ida feeling less like a real person and more like a bundle of themes the movie keeps spelling out.
Things improve once Christian Bale arrives as Frankenstein’s monster (how could it not). He gets a much stronger introduction, and Bale finds a better balance, leaning into the theatricality with a mumbled voice while grounding it in the constant sadness in his eyes. His Frank, as Ida calls him, is simplified into a need for connection that also becomes a genuine love of cinema, and it ends up being the only arc that feels emotionally coherent. Even then, the film leans on the tired device of having him lie to the Bride about her former life, but, ironically, he remains the movie’s best part.
Unfortunately, little outside of Bale works. The film wants to be a feminist cry of anger, a detective story, a Poor Things-style mad scientist character piece, a murder-revenge thriller, and a twisted Bonnie and Clyde riff. It has all of that, but it is not good at any of it. The detective subplot, in particular, is stretched thin, and it should be the easiest bridge into the Bride’s revolt. Instead, the “revolt” barely takes center stage, and when it does, it is often treated like a gag (including the repeated bit of the assistant’s black cheek tattoo).
The central romance also feels underdeveloped, which makes it a weak foundation for the film’s broader claims. There is strong production design, great monster makeup, and a midsection dance sequence that injects some energy. But the overreliance on Dutch angles and mid-close-ups wastes those strengths and makes the IMAX presentation feel mostly pointless. Apparently, the film’s most daring material was cut by the studio, but the final version mostly relies on shock and attitude, and it rarely turns them into actual points. It gestures toward female rage as historical correction, then dissipates that rage into disconnected set pieces, so the target remains visible but the argument never fully arrives.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Gyllenhaal’s move into a larger-scale Gothic feminist tale results in a film as disjointed as its own stitched bodies. Occasional strong moments, sharp design choices, and Bale’s performance fight an uphill battle against weak pacing, disconnected subplots, and a film that keeps trying too hard while still holding itself back. For all its ambition, The Bride! ends up feeling murky, unpleasant, and unquestionably frustrating. Another Frankenstein-related project that feels badly stitched together.