The Bride! Review

The Bride! is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second film as a writer/director. She goes from an awards-contending drama to a big-budget Gothic romance inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the 1935 movie The Bride of Frankenstein.

Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale) arrives in Chicago in 1936 to find a brilliant but controversial scientist, Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening). Frank asks the scientist to create a wife so his depressing loneliness can end. They resurrect a woman (Jessie Buckley) buried in a pauper’s grave, but she has no memory of her life before her death. As Frank and The Bride slowly get to know each other, they end up going on a cross-country journey whilst being hunted by the police and gangsters.

The Bride! has already gained a reputation for being the most divisive of 2026, so far. It has a 57% on Rotten Tomatoes, 5.9 on IMDB, and 2.9 on Letterboxd. It’s also set to be a massive flop, having a poor opening weekend. It didn’t help that The Bride! has been released a few months after Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein on Netflix.

The Bride! was an ambitious but frustrating film. It had a lavish production due to the Art Deco production design and the make-up on the resurrected characters. The Bride! will be compared to del Toro’s version, yet the 1930s setting and designs made it closer to the Mexican filmmaker’s remake of Nightmare Alley. Gyllenhaal made it clear what she wanted to make: a feminist film. Throughout the film, there were highly skilled women who were maligned because of their gender. Dr. Euphronious published under her initial because a female scientist wouldn’t be respected, and Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz) was a skilled detective, but she was classed as a secretary, and her partner hogged all the credit. When Malloy was put into a position of power, she was ignored because of her gender.

The other feminist aspect was violence against women. The villain of the film was Lupino (Zlatko Burić), a Chicago-based crime lord who ordered the murders of women and had their tongues cut out as a warning. The titular Bride was a victim of sexual violence. She was harassed by men at a club and sexually assaulted by others at different points. The Bride delivered an impassioned speech in the middle of the film, which became a rallying cry for women across America. Many women copied The Bride’s tattoos and took action against men, similar to Joker, where the citizens of Gotham dressed up like the comic book character and rose against the wealthy elites of the city.

The Bride! has been criticised by a Scottish alcoholic and an ex-meth dealer because it was a feminist film. That was not the issue for The Bride! since it was trying to say something and have some depth. I would put it above Warner Brothers’ version of Wuthering Heights, which seemed to celebrate toxic relationships.

The Bride! real issue was how messy it was. This was shown right at the beginning. The film opened with text saying Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818 on a dare, and Shelley herself speaks to the audience, before possessing a woman in Chicago. It set up a bizarre world and tone for the film. Due to the possession, it led to Jessie Buckley having a wild performance as she spoke with a thick Midwestern accent and shifted into being an articulate Englishwoman. Showing Mary Shelley’s existence raises a lot of questions since the author lived in the same world as her creation.

The film’s story was all over the place. The film seemed like it was going in a similar direction to Poor Things, where Frank and The Bride escape their captivity and travel across America with an amnesiac woman who tries to figure out who she is. Then it turned into a Bonnie and Clyde-style story because The Bride became a revolutionary figure. The story expands to being a crime story involving the police, and gangsters were trying to find Frank and The Bride. Finally, there was a storyline involving Frank’s loneliness since he had been isolated for over 100 years. It seemed like Gyllenhaal threw every idea she had when writing the draft and couldn’t find it in herself to cut and refine her work.

The Bride! was a case of being a noble failure, which made it an interesting experience. It had a lot to say but wasn’t able to put it all in a cohesive package.