Movies

Ida (Jessie Buckley) awaits reinvigoration as The Bride!
Photo: Warner Bros.

The Bride!
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
Rated R
Wed 6 March 2026
#TheBrideMovie

The Bride! is a wild, monstrous mess.

Brain Attack!

Oh no she didn’t. Did she?

Yes. She did.

There’s a scene in which this movie’s Frankenstein’s monster (played with an amount of nuance only Christian Bale could pull off through considerable layers of prosthetics) dances with his sorta bride, Ida (gamely brought to life by Jessie Buckley). They’ve crashed a lavish ballroom party. And they dance to Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ on the Ritz.

It’s a creative call by Maggie Gyllenhaal – who’s both the sole screenwriter and the director – that is arguably inexcusable. It takes the audience out of the singular dramatic (and violent) experience that is The Bride! and drops it back in time to Mel Brooks’ mega-classic comedy Young Frankenstein.

The derisive quips are easy.

The Bride! is a Frankenmovie.

The Bride! is a collection of movie parts that are only loosely stitched together.

The Bride! is less than the sum of its parts.

The Bride! doesn’t know what it wants to be.

The Bride! has cold feet… and hands… and heart…

Quips aside, the shame of it is there is absolutely no doubt Gyllenhaal had a vision for where she wanted to take The Bride! The concept (essentially) is a story of female empowerment led by the angry and discontent spirit of Mary Shelley – the author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus way back in 1818 – who seeks a way to finish her story. As fate would have it, Mary finds something of a kindred spirit in a rebellious, fiery woman named Ida. Ida’s on the cusp of a horrible accident.

Mary (also played by Buckley) breaks through the fourth wall from the great beyond and proclaims her next story is more powerful than any tale of horror. It’s a love story.

Okay.

It’s a good, creepy setup.

The Dead Are Angry!

The problems start early, though. As the action plays out, the result is a mash – a monster mash (good gravy, the Halloween ear worm even plays during the end credits) – of historical and cinematic influences including Bonne & Clyde, Fred Astaire and Batman.

Perhaps this “love story,” in that context, can best be described as a Harley Quinn romance rather than one of those cheap Harlequin paperback love stories of torrid passions. The only thing Ida’s missing to complete this picture is an over-sized mallet.

Regardless, it’s woefully misguided. Sure, Mary Shelley’s been regarded as a rebel for her time (including her scandalous relationship with eventual husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley). But this is something of a misappropriation of Mary’s personal story and motivations.

As it stands, The Bride! starts in 1936 Chicago. This movie’s “mad scientist” is Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening). She conducted some sort of bizarre psycho-sexual experiments with her (now gone) husband and her work (including publications such as Event Horizon and Birth of Singularity) caught the eye of Frankenstein’s monster, who’s still alive and kicking more than a century since his “birth.”

All of Cornelia’s scientific babble – including “disobedient geometry” – is rather fun, but a little research on Gyllenhaal’s part could’ve brought more gravitas than jibber-jabber. As for Frank, he’s surprised to find out the mad doctor is a woman. She explains she publishes under the name C. Euphronious to hide her gender from her peers. And with that, Gyllenhaal begins to enforce and reinforce her agenda. The Bride! is supposed to be about female empowerment and a belated response to the #MeToo movement. (Ida even shouts out emphatically, “Me too, me too!”)

But it’s such shoddy, sloppy storytelling that constantly undermines Maggie’s own best intentions. Ida is never set up as a sympathetic character, but she is the victim of a Chicago gangland boss who (echoing Jeffrey Epstein) has a harem of young women. Going further, this mob boss collects his victims’ tongues in glass jars so they can’t speak about their horrifying experiences.

Gyllenhaal throws disparate ideas and concepts around with wild abandon. It gets reckless (and, “frankly,” insulting) with a time-bending escape into a Manhattan theatre to take in - of all things - a 3D horror/zombie/sci-fi extravaganza. But, just as Frank sees himself as a classy dancer in a top hat, he can also see himself as a monster that is both terrorizing and terrifed.

The Movie in My Mind!

Anyway, Frank seeks out Cornelia because he is lonely. He’s so lonely, it’s agonizing. The solace he finds in happy song-and-dance movies featuring his favorite movie star, Ronnie Reed (played by Maggie’s singing-and-dancing brother, Jake Gyllenhaal), has its limits. He needs something real.

So, Frank wants Cornelia to “build” him a wife.

Enter the recently deceased Ida, dug up as a fresh corpse ripe for some “reinvigoration.”

On their first quasi-date, a bullying incident outside a nightclub leads Frank to brutally kill his assailants while defending his female friend, Ida. The two then go on the lam, traveling from Chicago to New York and other locales.

On the hunt to bring the pair to justice is a gumshoe, Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard), and his understudy, Myrna Mallow (Penelope Cruz). Bringing back that theme of sexism, Myrna is often ignored or meant to feel invisible to her male colleagues. Of course, Myrna is sharper than her male cohorts and she latches on to Frank’s adoration of the silver screen and Ronnie Reed. She notices a trend. Frank and Ida pop up in locations and settings found in Ronnie’s movies (boasting titles like Heartbreak Holiday and The Dubious Detective).

It all leads to a ridiculously over-the-top showdown back in Cornelia’s lab amid a barrage of blazing bullets.

There are times watching The Bride! actually becomes rather painful. Not because of the violence, the gore, the strange sexuality or the profanity. It’s because Maggie Gyllenhaal was left to her own devices and made some remarkably poor, discordant creative choices. Perhaps the best use for The Bride! is as a cautionary example of self-sabotage. Maggie’s surrounded by friends (for one, Bale was her romantic co-star in The Dark Knight) and family, with brother Jake on screen and in the end credits Maggie thanks “My mom” and “My dad” and dedicates the movie to “My husband” and “My daughters.”

Apparently, none of them spoke up about some of Maggie’s choices. Or maybe they weren’t heard.

Find Your Name, Girl!

Amid Frank and Ida’s crime spree and cross-country antics (akin to Bonnie and Clyde), Ida inadvertently sparks a movement. Women adopt her creepy facial “makeup,” which is actually crusted-over blackened blood from when Ida spat up during her “reinvigoration” in Cornelia’s lab. The rage is expressed. The vengeance against that Chicago mob boss is pursued.

And yet The Bride! could’ve been so much more.

One moment after another is either misplaced or recalls a much better movie. The women sporting Ida’s look come across much like the Joker’s crazed followers in Todd Phillips’ sharp reimagining of the comic book character. The desire to scream out against Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk evokes Blink Twice, which was its own troubled moviegoing experience from director Zoe Kravitz.

At one point, Mary Shelley shouts out to Ida across the great divide of life and death, fantasy and reality: “Find your name, girl!”

But does Ida? Really?

When their fate seems sealed, Frank offers Ida this gem, “There is nothing left to do but live.”

It’s another good moment that could’ve gone someplace else in this slick production with great, evocative 1930s settings.

It’s a terrific cast across the board.

It’s a story with loads of potential. It could’ve led to a timeless modern classic building on a century-old tale.

There’s a really clever moment when Bale’s Frank puts down a newspaper and looks in a mirror. It’s brief, but with the lighting and the angle, he looks eerily like Boris Karloff’s monster. That’s atmospheric. That’s cinematic. That’s a cross-reference worth having.

Those flashes of brilliance, though, are dragged down by so many missteps.

O the horror.

The horror.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.

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