The second film from actress-turned-writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, “The Bride!,” arrived March 6, as an audaciously loud reimagining of one of horror’s most historically silenced figures.
Positioned as both a continuation and revision of 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein,” the film attempts to reclaim the Bride not as a footnote, but as a force. It’s a bold premise, one that often feels too large to cohere within the boundaries of a conventional film fully.
This reinterpretation is set in the 1930s and follows a lonely, anxious, film-obsessed middle-aged Frankenstein (Christian Bale) who travels to Chicago to ask the revolutionary mad scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Benning) to create a companion for him. Together, they revive a recently murdered young woman and the Bride (Jessie Buckley) is born.
The gothic romantic tone is quickly shed in favor of a more daring, hyper-theatrical odyssey. The film reframes Frankenstein’s mythology as a Bonnie and Clyde style fugitive narrative, laced with musicality and heightened performances.
From its opening, Gyllenhaal signals a maximalist, theatrical approach, a departure from the quiet nuance of her debut film “The Lost Daughter.” Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein,” appears as a cackling, almost cartoonish specter, directly manipulating the Bride and addressing the audience.
It’s a striking image that sets this film’s ambitious tone and often makes it feel like it belongs on stage where its heightened tone and elasticity could fully breathe. On screen, that same energy frequently feels like it’s bursting at the seams, and that tension defines the film.
When “The Bride!” fully commits to its most transgressive instincts, leaning into camp, absurdity and musical spectacle, it becomes genuinely electric. Sequences like the dance number leading into a noir-infused police shootout are hilarious, strange and alive with possibility, suggesting a far more formally daring film just beneath the surface. But those moments come in flashes.
Too often, the film pulls back, attempting to ground its ideas in a broader feminist framework that never quite matches its formal ambition. What begins as a provocative exploration of identity – of being constructed, named and defined through gender and death at the hands of a pitiful man – gradually flattens into something more familiar.
The film gestures toward more radical gender critique, but frequently settles into a “girlboss” rhetoric that undercuts its own edge, namely the Detective Malloy (Penelope Cruz) investigation subplot that felt so irrelevant to the film’s central ethos, almost like this is a few different films forced into one.
The result is a film caught between two identities: one anarchic, playful and formally daring, the other cautious, explanatory and thematically diluted. It invites comparisons to Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things,” though where that film commits fully to its surrealism and philosophical provocation, “The Bride!” feels more like a hesitant echo.
Still, there is much to admire in its construction. Jessie Buckley delivers a chaotic, magnetic performance as the Bride, fully embracing her character’s volatility. The production design and costuming create a glittering, stylized world and the film’s genre-hopping – weaving together gothic monster movie, noir and musical – is never dull.
But these strengths ultimately reinforce the central issue: The film never quite decides what it wants to be. Its theatrical impulses overwhelm the narrative while its narrative instincts dilute its most exciting ideas. With a stronger commitment to its camp elements, its musicality and its transgressive reimagining of Frankenstein’s mythology, this film could have been great.
However, in its current form, “The Bride!” is a messy, intermittently exhilarating reimagining that never quite comes together – but is still far more fun than its shortcomings suggest. 5/10.
