The Bride! (2026) Review

Not all its parts fit together, but you’ll have a hard time forgetting it.

Sam Sewell-Peterson

Mar 16, 2026

The Bride! (2026)

Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Screenwriter: Maggie Gyllenhaal

Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal

by Sam Sewell-Peterson

Maggie Gyllehaal’s second film as director is a strange one, to say the least. The Bride! is a Bonnie and Clyde style outlaw couple on the run chase movie, an absurdist musical, and a feminist satire all at once. Not all its parts fit together, but you’ll have a hard time forgetting it.

Frankenstein’s Creature, now calling himself Frank (Christian Bale) emerges after a century in hiding in 1930s Chicago looking for a mad scientist to make him a mate. Said scientist, Dr. Euphronious (Annette Being) duly obliges and performs a miracle of revitalisation on the body of Ida (Jessie Buckley), a headstrong call girl mixed up with the mob, and after several violent incidents, Frank and the woman now calling herself the Bride go on the run across the USA pursued by cops and gangsters.

One of the stranger decisions Gyllenhaal makes in this builds on an idea lifted, appropriately, from James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. In that film, Mary Shelley makes an appearance in a framing device played by the same actress who would play the Bride at the climax. Gyllenhaal also has a Mary Shelley played by her Bride actress, but here she’s a frenzied spirit dissatisfied with her eventual fate who sporadically possesses Ida (Buckley switching from a Midwestern American twang to sounding like the English boarding school headmistress from Hell to symbolise this).

What’s weird here is that in this film’s universe, Mary Shelley still wrote Frankenstein, but a real Baron Frankenstein apparently also created his Creature (since he’s there to ask for his mate to be made), so was she documenting real events or did her fictional characters somehow gain life? Given the film’s porous sense of reality, either could be true, but it’s a shame to not interrogate this any further in the text itself.

Buckley is having another incredible year following her acclaimed turn in Hamnet, and here she attacks her role with relish, playing her character with physical and vocal wild abandon. The other performances are more of an acquired taste, a varying degree of scenery-chewing (especially from Bale), or being limited to a single character trait (Peter Sarsgaard eats all the time, Penélope Cruz is a woman in a man’s world). Too often everyone’s choice come down to, when in doubt, shout.

Frank is shown to be a big fan of cinema, chiefly represented by romantic films starring song and dance heartthrob Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). He frequently imagines himself and his bride appearing in the middle of the films he loves so much, the heightened world of the silver screen. Good visual metaphor for what a character is experiencing on an emotional level: it works. However, when other characters are also shown to be able to see the couple’s shared hallucinations, you’re just left confused.

You expect the references to Universal Horror and popular studio movies of the era, but riffs on Young Frankenstein and music videos are a little more perplexing. There’s more than one dance number that comes out of nowhere, which tonally jars with the gothic romance and more violent horror elements, especially when it’s left unclear how much of it is actually happening for real in the film’s world. It’s a sense of continuity, of a natural flow and momentum, that this work is really missing, leaving it as a series of disconnected, bizarre vignettes of the monster couple committing crimes and having a seriously unhealthy relationship.

Gyllenhaal has surrounded herself with a team of extremely talented collaborators doing among their best work. With her makeup and prosthetics, Nadia Stacey creates instantly iconic pop art takes on classic monsters, physically transforming Buckley and Bale while leaving them fully able to emote. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is both jazzy and moody, and the vivid colours and exaggerated shapes of Sandy Powell’s costumes perfectly match an off-kilter reality.

You have to applaud the ambition, and the boldness of some of the storytelling choices in The Bride!, but the final product ends up feeling like it’s rebelling against its creator’s abundance of ideas. Frankenstein in prohibition-era Chicago, Mary Shelley possessing someone to finish her story, a female monster’s plight inspiring a “good for her” feminist revolution; any of these would have been fascinating to see play out on their own. Trying to do all of these at once leaves the viewer perplexed and frustrated, even if they’re rarely not beguiled as well.

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