Crew
Director/Screenplay – Maggie Gyllenhaal, Producers – Maggie Gyllenhaal, Talia Kleinhendler, Emma Tillinger Kossoff & Osnat Handelsman Keren, Photography – Lawrence Sher, Music – Hildur Guðnadóttir, Additional Music – Philip Klein, Visual Effects Supervisor – Mark Russell, Visual Effects – Industrial Light & Magic, One of Us (Supervisor – Guillaume Menard) & Twin Pines, Special Effects Supervisor – Devin Maggio, Makeup Designers for Frank – Chris Gallaher & Scott Stoddard, Production Design – Karen Murphy. Production Company – First Love Films/In the Current Company.
Cast
Jessie Buckley (The Bride/Ida/Mary Shelley), Christian Bale (Frank), Annette Bening (Dr. Cornelia Euphronius), Penelope Cruz (Myrna Molloy), Peter Sarsgaard (Jake Wiles), Jake Gyllenhaal (Ronnie Reed), John Magaro (Clyde), Zlatko Buric (Lupino), Jeannie Berlin (Greta), Matthew Maher (James)
Plot
Chicago, 1936. Dr. Cornelia Euphronius is approached by a badly scarred man who calls himself Frank. He explains that he is the original Frankenstein monster and asks her to help build him a female companion. They dig up the body of Ida, a woman who was thrown down the stairs by mobsters. Unknown to them, Ida has been possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley. Ida is resurrected and Frank eagerly greets her as his bride. However, the bride is rebellious and defies every attempt to control her. Frank sneaks the bride out at night to a movie theatre but they are attacked by men as they leave and Frank kills them. The two are forced to go on the run but other deaths occur along the way, resulting in a massive manhunt for them. Soon, the bride’s outrageous exploits begin to inspire a women’s uprising all across the country.
A few years ago in the 2010s, Universal attempted to create the Dark Universe, a shared universe built around their Famous Monsters. I initially assumed The Bride! to be their previously announced remake of Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The Dark Universe version was planned to have starred Angelina Jolie in the role under director Bill Condon. However, this never went ahead with the flop of the first two Dark Universe films Dracula Untold (2014) and The Mummy (2017). Some of these Dark Universe films have trickled out under other guises such as The Invisible Man (2020) and Wolf Man (2025). However, this does not appear to be the case here and The Bride! is an original work.
Though the film even resurrects the spirit of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818), to announce that this is a sequel to her book, the Bride of Frankenstein is a creation of the movies more so than it ever was Mary Shelley. Certainly, in the book, there are scenes, somewhat analogous to the ones here, where the creature comes to Frankenstein and asks him to make him a female companion. Frankenstein creates a female body but, fearing that she and his male creation might breed a race of monsters, decides to destroy it before bringing it to life. However, that’s it in the way of brides of Frankenstein as far as Shelley is concerned.
The real Bride of Frankenstein that people think about began with Elsa Lanchester’s memorable performance in the second of the Universal Frankenstein films, Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Lanchester is only alive and on screen for less than five minutes at the end of the film, nevertheless the character has become an iconic one. Variations on the Bride appear in films like Frankenstein: The True Story (1974), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) and tv’s Penny Dreadful (2014-6), while characters modelled on the bride’s look appear in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Frankenweenie (2012), Lisa Frankenstein and the Hotel Transylvania films. There was also the previously titled The Bride (1985) where a female creature (Jennifer Beals) was brought to life by Sting’s Frankenstein.
The Bride! is a new version of the story that is directed by actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal often has a history of transgressive role. She, after all, came to fame in Secretary (2005) where she plays a woman who is a sub in a BDSM relationship. And there have been other roles such as Sherrybaby (2006) with her as a heroin addict and her award-winning work in tv’s The Deuce (2017-9) as a prostitute turned pornographer. Gyllenhaal had previously made her directorial debut with the well-received, awards-winning The Lost Daughter (2021). The Bride! is a family affair with Maggie’s brother Jake playing Ronnie Reed, the movie star that Frank adores, and her husband Peter Sarsgaard playing one of the pursuing detectives.
You suspect that the inspiration for The Bride!was the cluster of Frankenstein films that came out a couple of years earlier with Poor Things (2023) and Lisa Frankenstein (2024), both of which reinterpreted the Frankenstein film in terms of a woman’s film. Poor Things in particular was a massive success, receiving a number of Academy Awards nominations, including a win for Emma Stone as the female creation. And of course only six months before The Bride! came out, Guillermo Del Toro delivered his magnificent reinterpretation of Shelley with Frankenstein (2025). Going by this, it seemed that we were in the midst of a revival of the Frankenstein Film.
However, The Bride! ended up flopping badly – a total of $24 million at the box-office worldwide against a $90 million budget. Watching it, you can fully understand why. It is one of the first truly spectacularly bad movies of the 2020s. The film is a trainwreck from the opening scene where we are introduced to Mary Shelley as narrator (also played by Jessie Buckley). (Certainly, the idea of Shelley as a framing figure who introduces her sequel is one taken direct from the prologue of Bride of Frankenstein). However, when it gets to Shelley introducing the creation “Here comes the motherfucking bride,” you start to sink into your seat. We are then introduced to Jessie Buckley’s Ida in a lunatically over-the-top scene where she goes mad in a restaurant, ranting incoherently about riding side-saddle and handjobs under the table. Your immediate impression is “WTF am I watching?” Your second though is just what an insult to Mary Shelley her portrayal is here – Shelley has been resurrected as a feminist icon in recent years, but her life in no way celebrated vulgarity or brash anti-authoritarianism and rule breaking (that was more the province of her husband Percy Shelley and especially his good friend Lord Byron), let alone the film’s brand of what you could call anarcho-feminism.
Certainly, the film quietens down somewhat with the introduction of Christian Bale. Bale gives us an appealing Frankenstein monster – modest, politely mannered and it is a decent performance. It is just that as soon as the film gets Jessie Buckley resurrected as The Bride, not long after, that everything starts to go completely off the rails. I’ve admired Buckley as an actress who has been doing some solidly serious acting in recent years – indeed, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in Hamnet (2025) just before I watched this. Here she has been given direction to take the role as over-the-top as she wants. Hers is a Bride who is loud, brash, defiant, rule-breaking, anarchic. All of which might be interesting if the same had not been conducted with a great deal more sophistication and to quite hilarious effect by Emma Stone in Poor Things. You wonder what on Earth happened to Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jessie Buckley that they conceived that such an awful and unrestrained performance would amount to a positive women’s role, let something that would engage audiences.
There is a good idea somewhere inside the script and it is allowed to occasionally emerge – the postmodern monsters who are framing themselves in terms of being monsters – but it wrecked every so often when Maggie Gyllenhaal lets Jessie Buckley loose on a scene. The script is all over the place and filled with veering changes of tone and points that Gyllenhaal wants to pack in. One minute it is a meta Frankenstein film, the next it turns into a variation on Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the next it jumps into song and dance numbers, the next Gyllenhaal is trying to hammer home a series of feminist position points, even rather absurdly have the Bride inspire an uprising of lookalikes across the country. When it came to the scene with Jessie Buckley putting a gun to the head of Jake Gyllenhaal in a ballroom, it reached a point where I can honestly say I have no idea what is was that she was ranting on and on about.
I also have some major quibbles with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s lack of research that leaves a number of grating anachronisms. The year is supposed to be 1936 but we get a scene where Frank and The Bride wander into a movie theatre and patrons are wearing anaglyphic 3D glasses – sixteen years before the original 3D fad began in 1952. Annette Bening’s doctor throws around a word salad of scientific terms, including ‘event horizon’ two decades before it was coined by Wolfgang Rindler. Other references to spacetime and singularities would have been plausible, albeit with quite a stretch, to someone in the scientific community. At another point, Peter Sarsgaard refers to possible careers for a woman with suggestions such as astronaut (a term that was not adopted into public usage until 1950) and a brain surgeon (which did not come about until Diana Beck in the UK in 1939).
Trailer here