Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein reimagining is so committed to its thesis that it forgot to build a movie around it.
There’s a moment about forty minutes into The Bride! where Jessie Buckley, playing the reanimated woman at the film’s center, turns to face the camera and delivers a monologue about female rage. The monologue is, in isolation, quite good. Buckley is extraordinary in the way that she is always extraordinary. All live wire and barely-contained static, the sense that she might arc electricity at any moment. The monologue crackles. It is the speech the Bride of Frankenstein has been waiting nearly a century to give.
And then the movie continues, and she delivers essentially the same speech again. And then again. Each time with slightly different furniture around it.
This is the fundamental problem with The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s long-gestating, heavily-tested, reportedly-studio-compromised feminist gothic road picture, which arrives in theaters having already generated more interesting discourse about its production than the film itself will likely sustain. It is a movie that mistakes having a message for having a story. It knows, with absolute certainty, what it wants to say. And it has almost no idea how to make you feel it.
I should say upfront that I am predisposed to root for this film. Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter is one of the more undervalued directorial debuts of the past decade. It’s a film that understood how to make a woman’s interiority feel like landscape. How to let Olivia Colman‘s discomfort bleed into every frame without ever explaining it to death. It trusted its audience. It was genuinely interested in the complexity of being a woman who refuses to perform her own goodness.
But The Bride! does not trust its audience. Not even a little.
A promising premise that never becomes a movie.
The film’s premise is, on paper, exciting. The spirit of Mary Shelley possesses the body of a murdered Depression-era sex worker, who is then dug up and reanimated by Frankenstein’s monster — here recast as “Frank” (Christian Bale, doing some lovely work in a movie that doesn’t quite deserve him) — to be his companion.
The monster and the Bride become Bonnie-and-Clyde fugitives. They shoot people. Dance. They evade Penélope Cruz, playing a female detective who is the most underwritten character in a film full of underwritten characters.
They also bafflingly inspire women to riot at one point. The film calls this feminism. It is, instead, a mood board mistaken for a narrative.
When style replaces structure.
The comparison everyone is reaching for — and not without reason — is Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips‘s 2024 disaster, which also involved an outlaw couple, also involved musical numbers that arrived without adequate cinematic grammar to justify them, and also confused the gesture toward transgression with actual transgression. The comparison is uncomfortable for The Bride!‘s defenders because it implies that style without structure is not a different kind of cinema but simply a more expensive version of failure. I think that discomfort is worth sitting with.
See, what made Joker: Folie à Deux such a productive catastrophe — and I do think there’s something productively interesting about how badly it failed — was that you could see exactly where Phillips’s ideas ran out and the movie kept going anyway. The Bride! has the same quality, only Gyllenhaal’s ideas are more interesting and sincere, which makes it more painful to watch them collapse.
The Mary Shelley framing device, for instance, is a fascinating choice that the film doesn’t know what to do with. Buckley plays Shelley in black-and-white prologue sequences, speaking directly to camera from some spectral anteroom. The conceit positions the film as Shelley’s revenge fantasy, as the story she couldn’t publish in her lifetime because it was too dangerous, too honest about what men do with women’s bodies. This is such a rich idea. The film introduces it, announces it several times, and then largely abandons any rigorous engagement with it in favor of the Bride shooting people and growling about female rage.
Jessie Buckley, trapped in a character that never exists.
Buckley is the engine of this movie and also, paradoxically, part of what makes it so exhausting. She is giving a performance calibrated for a film with more psychological geometry than this one has. The Bride never develops interior life. No, she develops positions. She’s outraged, then tender, then outraged again, then briefly confused about her name (the film circles her identity question in a way that suggests profundity but produces only circling). Buckley keeps throwing everything at the wall because the script gives her no load-bearing wall to build against.
The result is a performance that is technically ferocious and emotionally hollow. Not because Buckley lacks the instrument, but because Gyllenhaal never tells her what the song is actually about. Put another way, it’s a performance in search of a character, making more and more noise in the hope that noise will eventually produce meaning.
There are moments where the film nearly becomes what it wants to be. A nightclub sequence in the film’s middle third has some actual electricity. Bale’s Frank, obsessed with a fictional Gene Kelly-type star played by Jake Gyllenhaal with suspect comic timing, breaks into something resembling pure joy, and the film briefly feels like it understands what pleasure can do in the register of the transgressive.
Flashes of the movie this could’ve been.
A scene where the Bride watches herself become a symbol to other women has visual intelligence that the film mostly squanders by having characters explain it in dialogue. Sandy Powell’s costuming is extraordinary throughout, particularly the Bride’s burnt-orange puffed-sleeve dress, which does more characterization work than most of the screenplay.
But these are set-pieces, not scenes. They don’t assemble or build toward anything of gritty substance. The film lurches between them with the structural logic of a mood playlist rather than a drama.
I keep thinking about what The Bride! might have been as a truly strange, smaller film. Something in the neighborhood of American Gods or Gunpowder Milkshake or even early-season Penny Dreadful, works that understood how to let female monstrousness breathe without turning it into a position paper.
The scale of this film — reportedly $80 to $100 million — seems to have worked against it in ways that had nothing to do with the studio interference Gyllenhaal has publicly described. After all, big budgets demand legibility. The Bride! isn’t a film that cares about legibility. This is a mismatch from which the film simply never recovers.
A symbol instead of a person.
There is also something worth naming about the film’s relationship to its own feminist politics. The Bride’s arc from murdered woman to liberated symbol inspiring mass revolt would be moving if the film had spent any time making her feel like a person rather than a podium.
The Bride of Frankenstein has always been compelling precisely because she barely exists, because she is pure negation and raw symbolism. Gyllenhaal wants to give her a voice, which is a meaningful impulse. But what she gives her, in practice, is a position. And positions, unlike people, are impossible to love.
The film ends — I won’t say how, exactly — in a way that suggests Gyllenhaal confused the Bride’s liberation with the audience’s. We haven’t been held captive. We’ve been lectured at for two hours by a film that thinks its conviction is sufficient substitute for its craft.
The bottom line.
The Bride! will find its fierce defenders, and some of those defenses will be absolutely legitimate. It is not a boring film. It is never less than visually committed, and there are worse ways to spend two hours than watching Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale orbit each other through a gorgeous, expressionist Americana by way of Gotham City. Gyllenhaal is clearly a filmmaker of genuine instinct and vision. The Lost Daughter remains evidence of what she can do when the scale matches the material.
But this film, in the form it exists in — compromised or not, director’s cut or not — is a failure of a specific and somewhat heartbreaking kind. It is the failure of a filmmaker who had too much to say and too few tools, in this particular movie, to say any of it. The monster assembled from disparate parts could not shock itself to life.
Here comes the motherfucking bride. She deserved a better movie.
