The Bride! (2026)

I have a feeling that a good many people will come to hate The Bride! – the second directorial effort from Maggie Gyllenhaal after her stunning debut with The Lost Daughter five years ago.  The movie is sometimes brilliant and more-often-than-not frustrating.  It has structural problems.  Some developments don’t make sense, and the back half is a massive tone shift from the opening – it peters out when it should be going off the rails.  But, you know, I’d rather see a movie with some spunk, a work of bold originality, one that swings for the fences than another pre-fab formula picture trading on a familiar brand name. 

The Bride! happens to drop as Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is about to head into the Oscars with nine nominations to show for it.  I don’t think we’ll see The Bride! on next year’s list of nominees.  Del Toro’s film is gorgeous but unashamedly faithful to Mary Shelley’s novel.  This film is sort of a punk rock fantasy, a fable told by Shelley from beyond the grave, of what The Bride of Frankenstein might have looked like if she had written it.  She laments that the brain tumor that claimed her life in 1851 robbed her of the ability to press forward with a sequel.

Shelley bookends The Bride! half in darkness from beyond the grave, with an angry sneer and played by Jessie Buckley.  She moves us into the story of The Bride, a nervous and rather unhinged young woman named Ida (also played by Buckley) presently occupying a Chicago nightclub circa 1932 where she is partying with members of the city’s gangsters.  She gets drunk and shoots her mouth off and, before you know it, decends a flight of stairs, the hard way.

A short time later, we meet a malformed man named Frank (Christian Bale) – whose father was Dr. Frankenstein.  He’s a sorrowful soul with a big heart and a face that could stop a clock.  He is very aware that his looks will not do him any favors when it comes t the dating pool, so he arrives at the door of a certain Dr. Euphorious (Annette Bening) and tells her that his existence has been a lonely one, that he needs a mate and she is just the doctor who can give him one, much in the same way that he himself was created.  After some reluctance, the good doctor takes the job.  By chance, their chosen corpse is that of the dearly departed Ida.

Wrenched out of the cauldron of eternal sleep, Ida has no memory of her previous life and is, at first a bit of a wild animal, reluctant to Frank’s tender advances.  What remains is Ida’s wild abandon.  With a shock of blonde curls and a smudge of black across her cheek (a tar-like substance that she coughed up when revived, and which stays there forever after).  She talks a lot, a WHOLE lot, sometimes screaming, sometimes musing, flitting sometimes back and forth between two ideas battering her head at once.  Buckley’s performance as Ida will either be received as an off-the-wall bit of genius play acting, or a mumble of styles fighting for space (it kinda depends on you).

I have a feeling that the adventure that follows, as Ida and Frank move through different environments of 1930s Chicago, and are generally received with scorn and terror, will be analyzed for years to come – the story of people who don’t look right, act right or adhere to the status quo.  They’re monsters in form, in spirit, in status, and in the court of public opinion.  They stand for all who try to live an unhinged and unconventional existence.

What is most striking is the way that the film deals with Ida and Franks’ run-ins with people who would do them harm – which often ends in murder.  The response to this is quite surprising, they force themselves to deal with what they have done.  They may be monsters but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a conscience.

The back half of the movie becomes a strange retelling of Bonnie and Clyde as the two go on the run after committing one murder too many.  But again, there are stakes, there are ramifications.  There’s isn’t an action climax to carry us to the finish line.  I liked that, but the very very end of the film, I’ll say, kind of cheapens out.  I wasn’t sure exactly what Gyllenhaal was trying to say; its an ending that feels inorganic to the rest of the film.

I don’t know how the film will be received, but I predict that it will pick up a cult audience in years to come, one that appreciates the off-the-cuff weirdness of avant-garde cinema.  I appreciate that.  I appreciate that Maggie Gyllenhaal didn’t pick a more conventional story to tell.  I appreciate an experiment that doesn’t rise to perfection more than a multi-million dollar movie that doesn’t even try.  Its an experiment, and you decided if it passed or failed.