In Review: The Bride!

By John Freeman on March 14, 2026 • ( 0 )

Review by Tim Robins

Pitched as a sequel to the novel Frankenstein by its onscreen author Mary Shelley, The Bride! is a riotous story about the monster and his corpse bride on a road trip to visit cities, watch films and cause mischief.

Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter, 2021), the film stars Jessie Buckley as the titular Bride and Christian Bale as the self-styled ‘Frank’ (as in Frankentstien’s monster) in wildly memorable performances, as they flee from detectives, police and gangsters across a fantastical 1930s America.

Opening to a mere $7 million on an $80 million budget, The Bride! has been hailed as a feminist flop. But it’s more fun to enjoy the film than trading insults. It’s fair to say, the incongruous sight of Frankenstein’s monster and his undead bride driving through the American countryside pursued by cops, is worth the price of admission.

The Bride! opens with the spirit of Mary Shelley plotting her return to Earth by possessing the mind of Ida (Buckley), a loose-lipped party girl drunkenly spilling the beans on a local mob boss who is sitting within earshot at the bar. Ida finds sharing a mind with Shelly a somewhat discombobulating experience, not least when she is unceremoniously killed.

Later, elsewhere in the city, Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening) , a passionate quantum physicist and would-be re-animator, receives a visit from ‘Frank’ , as the monster names himself, who wants her to make him a mate, for carnal pleasures.

By some huge coincidence, the pair happen to dig-up Ida, who still shares the consciousness of Mary Shelley but, once resurrected, suffers from amnesia about her own identity.

From then on, it’s party time! The undead couple in Chicago’s underground party scene. Frank indulges his love of dance and Shelly goes wild in his mate’s body. Sexual harassment and murderous reprisals ensue, attracting the attentions of the law. But it’s not all fun and games. Ida is troubled. Just who is she?

The Bride! isn’t without its difficulties. We aren’t given enough, early enough, to understand who Ida is, before she is possessed and starts word associating and occasionally adopting an affected British accent. But it is otherwise hard to tell when Ida is channeling Shelly and speaking with her own voice.

The potentially humorous battle of the consciousnesses never really arrives. More time was needed to establish Ida, and her relationship to the detective and the gangboss who are going to be important in the final act. Fortunately, Buckley’s performance is a tour de force. When it comes to spouting word salad, her character rivals Lucky in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Bale’s monster draws on Karloff’s soft spoken performances (obviously not in Universal’s actual Frankenstein movies), with more than a touch of Northern Grandpa meets Herman Munster. ‘Frank’ is a fan of the Hollywood musicals of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), who he gets to meet at a swanky party. Otherwise, ‘Frank’ spends his time watching Reed’s movies in the cinema and imagining himself in Reed’s roles. This leads to some amusing nods to ‘Young Frankenstein’ as Frank imitates Reed in his imagination and, later, in real life.

Critics have suggested that, to enjoy The Bride!, it is best to go with the flow. I tried, but the film’s structure is more than a little choppy. Like many recent movies, the film has its share of much-too-late-to-care info dumping. This is particularly true of Dr. Euphronius’s back story, which involves her losing her husband to the multi-verse or something. I was wondering if her husband’s consciousness was supposed to now occupy other characters.

Some of Gyllenhaal’s conceptualising issues of women’s identity are interesting but aren’t particularly clear. I guess that Ida’s free associating is dramatising the problems language poses for women in search of an independent identity. At the same time, her associations are not random but are from Shelley’s mind. Again, they are part of the author’s quest to ‘name’ Ida’s, to find just the right words. It is a very literary conceit. At times, Ida asserts, “I would prefer not to”, a quote from Moby Dick.

Some of the rest of the film’s observations on gender inequality are more on the nose, particularly in the relationship between a detective (Peter Sarsgaard) and his secretary (Penelope Cruz), who are pursuing the monsters across America. The characters have a poignant partnership. In an affecting story arc, the detective comes to support the secretary’s ambitions to become a detective too. Unfortunately, her run in with the men of the police force has seen it before, in The Silence of the Lambs quality.

There’s no doubt that the film is timely. The mob boss party scene is hard to watch, particularly in light of the current ‘Trump/Epstein‘ revelations. But The Bride! is not, as some might have you believe, a feminist lecture on toxic masculinity. Instead, it is a riotous celebration of women’s wayward potential for causing problems for the status quo. Among the fun moments are when The Bride! inspires women to adopt her just dug up from the grave and reanimated appearance and her chaotic trouble making.

Although I was frustrated by the sometimes choppy, pieced together nature of the storyline, there’s a lot to see here. You don’t have to be wedded to any gender politics to find The Bride! wildly-weirdly-wonderfully-wackily fun.

Tim Robins

The Bride! is in cinemas now | Official Site

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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.