Publication Date: 03-06-2026

The Bride! (2026) review

Dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

The Bride! couldn’t have been more of a stark pivot for director Maggie Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal made waves with her Oscar-nominated debut The Lost Daughter, a film that grappled with the concept of how much, if any, selfishness could be allotted in motherhood. Anchored by Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, and Dakota Johnson, it was a thoughtful and pensive picture.

Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is a maximalist reworking of Mary Shelley’s timeless novel. While plagued by a muchness in both visuals and subtext, the likes of which its script cannot sustain, the film clearly has Gyllenhaal feeling liberated as an auteur, as well as a resistance to being a filmmaker easy to categorize. It’s the kind of movie I am starting to get fatigued watching filmmakers try their hand at updating the stories of classic movie monsters, but Gyllenhaal’s fusion of 1930s aesthetics and cinema with Hammer Horror styles, while threading a Bonnie and Clyde narrative needle, at least makes this project feel more distinctively one’s own vision.

Writer/director Gyllenhaal starts the film with the curious creative choice of having Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) in a purgatorial space, remarking how she always wanted to write a sequel to Frankenstein. Cut to Shelley’s real-world counterpart, a 1930’s Chicago gangster wife named Ida (Buckley), who makes an outburst at a mafia-run restaurant before tripping down a flight of stairs and dying.

Ida’s corpse is in for a second life when Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) arrives in the Windy City seeking the genius of Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) to make him a female companion. Some electricity and hocus pocus and Ida is alive again, with no memory of her past. Unlike Elsa Lanchester, this Bride takes a liking to her man and his gentlemanly ways, but she also harbors a destructive, vulgar edge that makes her immediately a woman aware of her own agency.

Things get busy from there. The two lovers wind up as fugitives, traversing various locales based on movies starring Frank’s favorite a performer (Jake Gyllenhaal, naturally), and ending up the targets of a pair of detectives (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz). Some of the best scenes involve Frank and his mate going to the movie theater to watch gangster pictures and RKO musicals; a particularly great sequence occurs at a drive-in. These moments are a nice reprieve from the pop art style violence, and underscore the romantic chemistry of these two societal rejects. Such homages to bygone periods gives cinematographer Lawrence Sher — whose work on Joker: Folie à Deux will be an obviously fitting point of comparison — a chance to flex his visual acumen against a film that moves quickly and plays loosely by its own rules.

While she’s just a little more than a week out from presumably winning her first Oscar for Hamnet, Jessie Buckley’s performance here is a bit of a mixed bag. She clearly finds herself dancing to Gyllenhaal’s bombastic tune, but too often is her iteration of the Bride chaotic without being endearing. Of course, no one would reasonably expect the reincarnated women to be dainty and dutiful, but her erratic demeanor makes her a little exhausting. I would’ve liked to see Mia Goth in the same role. That said, I fully expect Buckley’s makeup — jet black lipstick with a bloody inkblot on her cheek — to become a staple at conventions all across America.

Christian Bale wisely plays stoic to contrast Buckley’s feral sensibilities. Funnily enough, I enjoyed Annette Bening’s performance as the Doctor; she’s clearly having a blast and she has some of the biggest laughs early. Penélope Cruz also impresses as a secretary fighting to transcend into a real gumshoe detective, all while relishing in chewing the scenery having to play straight in a film as linear as a circle.

But The Bride! is ultimately too scatterbrained for its own good. Shelley’s interjections and conversations with the Bride offer nothing thematically relevant to the story. When the resurrected dame begins becoming more conscious of her previous life, her catharsis is shortchanged because there’s simply too much noise and external nonsense occurring for the human brain to process what is being said. While the film might occasionally be an aesthetic accomplishment, it’s also not wacky enough to be consistently funny nor unnerving enough to function as a horror film. The fact that the end credits song is “Monster Mash” shows you how unserious the entire film is, and that makes its bumper sticker feminist commentary feel that much more hollow.

Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal. Directed by: Maggie Gyllenhaal.