Movies & TV The Bride The Bride! Can’t Decide Which Revolution It Wants to Power In the words of its eponymous character… I would prefer not to. By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on March 10, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share As a long-time admirer of writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s acting career, I was excited for The Bride! It has horror and romance and dance sequences (dreamed or imagined) and a character who hasn’t had enough story attached to her name. It has an absolutely phenomenal cast. It certainly promises a lot of the things I was hoping Joker: Folie a Deux would give us (which was probably a mistake on my part).  The Bride’s troubles begin in its very first frames—a strange plot device wherein the ghost of Mary Shelley (Jesse Buckley), the author herself, lets us know that she was unable to write the story she wanted to tell after Frankenstein due to dying. She’s stuck in a void/purgatory of some sort until she gets this opportunity, which is now upon us. Said opportunity involves “possessing” a young woman named Ida (also Jesse Buckley) in the year 1936 in a manner that ultimately causes her death. After all, you can’t be the Bride of Frankenstein without a resurrection. Forgive me, but… what? Okay, sure, this is clearly meant to reflect the opening of 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein—there, too, Mary Shelley is a character who appears at the opening to tell Lord Byron, husband Percy, and the viewer that she has more story to tell. But a reflection is only worthwhile if it adds something of value to your story. This feels like pieces of a first draft that should have been red-penned and summarily scrapped. Shelley’s “presence” in the narrative is by far its weakest link, and that’s rather pointed in a film that has at least a baker’s dozen worth of narrative threads it keeps failing to weave into a cohesive whole. Because Shelley occupies such an elephantine place in our cultural conscience—she kinda invented an entire modern genre at the age of twenty—writers have a tendency to project all sorts of ideas onto her as a person when she’s fictionalized in any sense. In this instance, it seems as though she exists to wag a finger at screenwriter William Hurlbut for suggesting that Bride of Frankenstein would be the next story Shelley intended to tell. This one is the real deal, The Bride! seems to whisper to us. This is the sort of story Mary would get behind. And it’s silly because there’s never a moment where Shelley’s “authorship” of The Bride! makes a lick of sense, either in theme or in content or in narrative construction. 20th and 21st century feminism are both incredibly different from 19th century feminism. The choice to set the story the year after the Bride of Frankenstein film came out is puzzling because it doesn’t take place in the universe where Bride of Frankenstein was released—this is a universe in which Frankenstein’s monster is real. Are we in the 1930s for vibes, then? Or perhaps just for copious Bonnie and Clyde references? There are tons of those. The story unfolds as such: Ida is murdered after her “possession” by Shelley because she starts shooting her mouth off, and part of her babble includes incriminating talk about the local Chicago mob boss, Lupino (Zlatko Burić). Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), who we call Frank for the duration of this exercise, approaches Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening) about her work on reanimation. He’s hoping she can make him a companion because he’s so very lonely, and has been for well over a century. It’s here where I must pause and mourn for a movie that could have been, where Annette Bening gets far more screentime as our current flavor of mad scientist, with her lady maid Greta (Jeannie Berlin) serving as the best Igor replacement I ever could have wished for. The places where Gyllenhaal chooses to cast women in roles always reserved for men work are the high notes in the The Bride!, and it’s a shame that they don’t get more attention. And I should pause again because this setup is one of the first (and possibly most interesting) story threads gets swatted away in a hurry. Frankenstein says he’s needs a companion because he’s lonely, to which  Euphronious blessedly replies that everybody’s lonely. We’re in the midst of what many influencers and fearmongers are dubbing “the male loneliness epidemic,” so you’ll forgive me for expecting that The Bride! might be intentionally calling attention to this dynamic? That men expect women to offer them companionship because that is the place where they have been trained to expect all the warmth, closeness, and affection in their life to come from? There are brief glances at this thought, but no, that’s not what the film is aiming toward. Instead, Ida gets dug up and resurrected… but can no longer remember who she is. Frank and Euphronious lie, claiming she is Frank’s wife—or at least his fiancee—and she takes the name Penelope, or Penny, but she knows something is wrong. She escapes Euphronious’ institute and Frank follows, their burgeoning romance coming to the fore in queer dance halls and movies theaters—Frank is obsessed with Ronnie Reed (an utterly apropos turn by Jake Gyllenhaal), a Hollywood musical star, and shares this love with Penny. It here where I’ve got to stop again and note that the couple are promptly being hunted by the law due to Frank’s murder of two men… two men who, of course, try to rape Penny after her wild night in the dance hall. There’s a lot of attempted rape and sexual assault in The Bride! While I’m not against any depictions whatsoever as a matter of course, there’s nothing in these depictions that feels relevant or revelatory. If anything, those moments feel like a resurgence of the films of my youth, where it was shown all the time, everywhere, just to remind women and afab folks that this was the only thing waiting for them out in the world. The Bride! is a film that clearly wants to do something about that state of affairs; when Penny gets a bit of her memory back, she remembers that she had been working as part of a sting operation to expose Lupino, but all the girls kept getting murdered, their tongues cut out. (I remind you, this is supposedly the story Mary Shelley was desperate to tell before her death, according to the film.) In a fugue state at a fancy party—where a dance break just occurred, but more on that later—Penny starts spewing information as the cops arrive and surround her… and this winds up becoming fuel for a movement of woman gangs who punish men for their crimes against other women. Which sounds like it could have been a cathartic angle, were it any kind of focus in the film’s story. Oh, and there a few dance breaks, by the way. Some of them are in Frank’s head, moments where he gets to be the Ronnie Reed he so admires in his own dreams, but the one at the fancy party is set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Which you might recognize from another famous Frankenstein film that Mel Brooks directed. If you don’t, the script forces poor Bale to shout “Puttin’ on the Ritz!” in a frenzy. Trying to make anyone even attempt an echo of Peter Boyle’s greatest performance is… never the move. There are points and pieces of The Bride! that are so very enjoyable. (Honestly, that dance sequence is a blast until the homage trips into usurpation.) Parts of the romance are funny and endearing. Jessie Buckley is giving an unstoppable performance (even if the occasional switching back and forth to Shelley’s “possession” and accent feels more theater than film). The bits of old Hollywood glamor we get from Reed’s movies are expertly laid out. The makeup and costumes are fantastic, and I’ll be shocked if I don’t see cosplayers go all out with it on the convention circuit this year. But there are simply too many stories to tell and not enough cohesion. I haven’t even gotten to Penélope Cruz’s effortless performance as Myrna Malloy, the cop secretary who is better at solving crimes than her boss (a droopy, ineffectual Peter Sarsgaard). Their entire wing of the story is important, in fact, but do we really have time to get around to it? In this economy? If Gyllenhaal gets a co-writer or a script editor, I think her next film could be brilliant. She’s got the eye and room to grow. She clearly has a lot of tales she’d like to tell. But The Bride! isn’t there yet. It feels like listening to the orchestra tune their instruments before the performance begins—you get hints of what you’re about to experience, but not the experience itself.[end-mark] The post <i>The Bride!</i> Can’t Decide Which Revolution It Wants to Power appeared first on Reactor.