The Bride! (2026)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Heart-Eyed Monsters

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! Is, to say the least, over-the-top. You could even call it crazy-pants. It's the Moulin Rouge! of monster movies. Or maybe it's the Natural Born Killers of monster movies. Or maybe it's both. But I think I liked it. I also jotted down William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Sid & Nancy, and the hail-of-bullets finale of Bonnie and Clyde as spiritual cousins. (Gyllenhaal has cited Fritz Lang's Metropolis as an inspiration as well.) In other words, it's a love story that goes off the rails, hops onto the next rails over, goes off of those rails, and careens into the side of a volcano.

Mary Shelley suggested the idea for a bride in her 1818 novel Frankenstein, but that bride never came to fruition. That happened in 1935 in James Whale's masterful film Bride of Frankenstein. Whale had the brilliant idea to cast the same performer, Elsa Lanchester, as both the bride, and, in a prologue, Shelley herself. Gyllenhaal takes this idea and runs with it, starting the movie with a black-and-white Shelley (Jessie Buckley), who is apparently a ghost or a spirit trapped in some nether-realm. She finds "Ida" (Buckley) in Chicago of 1936 and is able to, I guess, partly possess her.

In a club full of dangerous gangsters, the newly-possessed "Ida" unleashes a mind-spinning monologue, climbing on tables and flipping back and forth between an erudite English accent and a street-level Chicago one. She gets herself thrown out of the club, and subsequently killed by thugs John Magaro and Matthew Maher, thrown down a flight of steps and landing with a broken leg and a broken neck.

Meanwhile, the monster (Christian Bale), who, as we all know is not named Frankenstein, but for the sake of this movie is called "Frank," arrives at the quarters of Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who has studied the original Dr. Frankenstein's work. He convinces her that he's dying of loneliness and would like her to make him a mate. Thus they dig up poor "Ida," and bring her back to life. She coughs and sputters some black chemical on her lips and cheek, and is permanently, stylishly marked.

It's not long before the monster pair get into trouble and go on the run, but their lifestyle is threatened when police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz) begin to follow their trail, and Jake knows something about "Ida's" past. (Comically, it's Myrna who is the real detective, always two jumps ahead of her lazy boss.) We also learn that Frank is obsessed with a movie star, cheerful song-and-dance man Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal).

In movie theaters, Frank watches Reed's movies and imagines himself dancing in the chorus. When he runs into the real Reed in a restaurant, a real musical number breaks out. There's also a bizarre scene inside a kind of speakeasy, a scene at a drive-in, and if the mood had struck her, I'm sure Gyllenhaal would have set a scene in the kitchen sink. The Bride! is her second feature after the Oscar-nominated The Lost Daughter, and the two films could not be more different. That one was as restrained and inert as this one is a whirlwind of motion and color. (Buckley and Sarsgaard, both in her first film, returned to work with her again.)

The main theme revolves around the Bride searching for her own identity. Her dual personality makes her both the creator and star of her own story, but Shelley's presence calms down as the Bride begins to realize who she is. She's not "Ida," which may or may not have been her real name before her death, and she's not "Penelope," the name that Frank gives her, and she's certainly not the "Bride of Frankenstein," the property of a male partner.

The Bride! is unabashedly a women-power movie (the Bride even screams "ME TOO" at one point), which may be why the reviews so far have been so tepid. The movies have been a boys' club since day one, and there are still, unfortunately, many who are loathe to see it any other way. I for one am glad for Gyllenhaal's vision, every lunatic bit of it. So there we have it, and we didn't even have to mention the 1985 movie The Bride (with Sting as the doctor and Jennifer Beals as the bride), which is probably better forgotten.