Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!* is, to use a bit of scholarly film-crit jargon, the damnedest fucking thing I’ve seen in ages. It’s a revisionist steampunk glam-punk gangster romance quasi-musical monster movie, and it’s every bit as focused as that sounds. It’s centered on a pair of performances from decorated actors (one an Oscar-winner, the other of whom almost certainly will be by the time The Bride! leaves theaters) which, depending on your disposition, are either career-best or career-worst. It will either make hundreds of millions of dollars or it will be a historic bomb. In the days since I’ve seen it, several people have asked me if it’s any good, and I truly have not known what to tell them. Let’s see if I can come to an answer by the end of this review.
The Bride! shares a framing device with James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, allowing Mary Shelley herself to introduce the story (despite the fact that neither film bears the slightest resemblance to anything Shelley actually wrote) and casting the same actress as author and Bride (there, the great Elsa Lanchester; here, Oscar-winner-to-be Jessie Buckley). Buckley’s Shelley is something of a profane, wizened, all-seeing godhead; imagine if Bela Lugosi’s omniscient narrator from Glen or Glenda? was played by Broken English-era Marianne Faithfull and you’ll have an idea of the vibe. Her Bride (“We’ll call her Ida— until she finds her own name!”) is an equally foul-mouthed gangster moll in 1930s Chicago. Shelley’s presence is so strong that her asides occasionally issue from Ida’s mouth, causing understandable confusion among the loutish men who surround her. After making the wrong remark in front of the wrong mob boss, Ida ends up deposited in Potter’s Field after being hurled down a stairwell. You know, Frankenstein stuff.
Speaking of, it turns out Frankenstein himself is also milling about the Windy City (“It was my father’s name,” he intones, brilliantly cutting off any actually-Frankenstein-is-the-doctor quibbles). Frankie is played by Christian Bale as a hybrid of the hyperverbose Jacob Elordi model and the classic, flat-topped Karloff. The monster has apparently spent the past couple centuries wandering the earth, and has taken to passing the time in matinees starring his favorite movie idol (Jake Gyllenhaal, having a blast). But he’s lonely, so he turns to self-described mad scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to build him a mate. Inevitably, they happen across Ida’s grave, and one bolt of lightning later an awkward courtship begins. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Frankenstein story if they didn’t eventually incite a torch-wielding mob, and soon our unconventional couple takes to the road like an undead Bonnie and Clyde.
That’s the setup, anyway, but I fear I’m not fully conveying how much stuff is packed into this movie. There’s a lot of Brechtian fourth-wall breaking, with Ida periodically conversing with Shelley in a sort of sub-narrative dream space. There’s a strange subplot in which a pair of Nick-and-Nora-ish detectives (Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz) tie the monstrous fugitives to a Capone-like mob boss (Triangle of Sadness’s Zlatko Buric) with a taste for carving out sex workers’ tongues. There’s a gender-fluid, Weimarish cabaret in which Fever Ray performs thumping electronic dance music (this anachronism bothered me far less than a scene in which Frankie and Ida take in a 3D movie, a technology which would not come into vogue until the ‘50s). There’s a bizarre homage to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein in which Frankie takes the stage to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” seemingly compelling his fellow nightclub patrons to join him against their will. In other words, The Bride! is a lot; in terms of gaudy excess, it makes Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” look like Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights.
One might think all of that sounds like a tall order to meld into a cohesive whole, and one would be correct. The Bride! is as jaggedly stitched together as its protagonists, a veritable Winchester Mystery House of conflicting tones, homages, and narrative devices. The script seems like it either endured dozens of revisions over several years or was dashed off over a single, manic weekend, with threads picked up and dropped seemingly at random. Even individual scenes are too stuffed to settle on a defined style, the film’s frenetic editing style frequently overpowering the (impressive) production design. It is as if each conceit is constantly jockeying against the others, screaming for attention.
The same is literally true for its two leads. Bale delivers the sort of bewildering, all-caps comic performance which high-minded method actors periodically employ to let their hair down— think Al Pacino in Dick Tracy, or Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau. He spends the entire film contorted and growling in an accent I’m not positive has ever existed on earth, but he seems to be having a grand old time. I’m not sure what to call Buckley’s performance, which weaponizes the actress’s unpredictable energy into a herky-jerky amalgam of Lanchester, Nancy Spungen, and seemingly whatever whim pops into her head. In a film which can only be described as A Lot, Buckley is the most.
In other words, The Bride! is a mess— and yet, despite my intellectual protestations, I can’t quite bring myself to dislike it. I tend to cut a lot of slack to studio pictures allowed to go big and weird, and few in recent memory have gone bigger or weirder than this one. Even the ideas which don’t quite work are charged into with such gusto and with such an oddball sense of humor that it’s difficult not to enjoy, or at the very least to admire the effort. It also ends on a needledrop so delightfully silly and on-the-nose that I walked out of the theater with a big, goofy grin on my face. If a film’s quality can be judged against how it makes you feel, it’s tough to knock The Bride!
Going back to that first question: Is The Bride! any good? As a critic, I feel like I have to answer no; too much of it falls flat, and virtually none of it hangs together as a cohesive whole. Yet I also wouldn’t dream of dissuading someone to see it. It would be easy to endorse it as a “guilty pleasure,” but even that doesn’t quite do justice to what’s happening here. What we have here is a movie which, like its grotesque power couple, feels like it should not be. Gyllenhaal has been granted an extraordinary amount of freedom to explore her obsessions, something increasingly rare for a production of this level and virtually unheard of for a relatively new female filmmaker. That it was allowed to make it onto the screen with so much of its glorious mess intact is something of a minor miracle, and I sense that those who love it will do so intensely. In a world of cookie-cutter franchise product, The Bride! is a proudly uneven breath of fresh air. To quote a renowned doctor whose name escapes me: it’s alive.
* – The title of The Bride! is stylized on screen and in all promotional materials with an exclamation point. Ordinarily I would dispense with such a clunky affectation after the first use, but in this case the exclamation point is essential to the meaning of the text. It’s loadbearing punctuation.
The Bride!
2026
dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal
127 min.
Now playing @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Somerville Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, Apple Cinemas Cambridge, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, the Museum of Science Mugar Omni Theater (!), and all local AMCs
