The Bride!

Review #2515: The Bride!

Cast: 

Jessie Buckley (Ida "The Bride" / Mary Shelley), Christian Bale ("Frank"), Annette Bening (Dr. Cornelia Euphronious), Peter Sarsgaard (Jake Wiles), Penélope Cruz (Myrna Malloy), John Magaro (Clyde), Matthew Maher (James), Zlatko Burić (Lupino), Jeannie Berlin (Greta), with Jake Gyllenhaal (Ronnie Reed), Julianne Hough (Iris / Jinx), and Louis Cancelmi (Officer Goodman) Written and Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Review: 

"Yes, there’s sexual violence. There’s violence. Because it’s a big studio movie, we tested and tested it. We had big screenings in malls, where people came to see it, which I had never been a part of as an actress or a director before. So fascinating. And one of the things that they brought up was the violence: Is it too violent? And I was talking about it with a girlfriend of mine, who said — and she wasn’t being reductive — “I wonder if you had been a man making this movie, if you would have had the same response.”

Admittedly, there was an inkling in my mind that this film could be one to pay attention to for all the wrong reasons. I vaguely remember the promos for the film but mostly I remember the totally edgy "her comes the mother f-" tagline that, believe it or not, is stated uncensored for the film at one point. I will, however, grant one nugget of praise right off the bat: this was a movie originally envisioned for Netflix (who had distributed Gyllenhaal's previous directorial effort, The Lost Daughter [2021] in the States), as it was announced as such in 2023 before Warner Bros. stepped in when there were apparent disputes  between Netflix and director Maggie Gyllenhaal over shooting in New York vs. New Jersey. Incidentally, Netflix distributed their own Frankenstein movie in 2025. Hooray for them, I guess. But hey, The Bride is a Warner Bros. movie that got released into plenty of theaters as a, well, Gothic romance movie. There were a few edits made to the film prior to its release, with one sequence apparently involving Frankenstein licking black vomit off someone's neck. So, there's that too. You might remember that when I reviewed The Bride (1985) a while ago, I made a snide note about the impending Bride film. I will now shamelessly repeat what I said: "God, could you imagine if The Bride! (made for reportedly $80 million scheduled for release 2026) is bad? If it is good, sure, cool. The trailer did not do many favors, but I would desire a tiny trainwreck if possible."

So, let's do a bit of a setup: Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus because of a suggestion to try writing a ghost story while with a group of Lord Byron and other folks in 1816 that eventually became its own novel in 1818; you might know that in the story, Frankenstein, when begged by the monster to make a female companion, elected to destroy it. Left unmentioned in The Bride is that Shelley wrote a wide variety of novels that ranged from historical in Valperga (1823) to travel books such as Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) before she died from a tumor in 1851 at the age of 53. Any of what I just said is far more interesting than trying to make heads or tails of what it really means for the film to feature Shelley in the afterlife wanting to tell of a story to follow Frankenstein and possessing a woman in 1936 Chicago that happens to dovetail with the arrival of Frankenstein's monster (who just goes by "Frank") wanting a companion (it is also possible that putting Shelley in the narrative is a way to do a twist on how Bride of Frankenstein had a prologue with Shelley talking about more of a story to tell with Frankenstein). One thing leads to another and, well, as Slap Shot [1977] once stated, "most folk heroes started out as criminals". 

What a weird little movie this is. Aside from the 126-minute runtime, what we have here is a movie that is somehow bloated in its litany of wayward plot threads and characters to barely care about and yet also is begging for something to truly latch onto, even in an exploitative sense. If this was made on a budget of, say, a fraction of a fraction of the reported $80 million with plenty of corners to cut and straight exploitation, maybe you would get something to rival, well, Frankenhooker (1990). But you get a movie that has a proverbial stick up its ass* from the very beginning and never really cuts itself loose for anything that is actually meaningful. Even as a film trying to supposedly say something about the experience of women beyond what you could gleam from say, reading a Wikipedia article. It's pretty funny that a movie that yearns to say something about empowerment has a title character that basically spends most of the movie being misled about their name (well, first name anyway) only to just go with being "The Bride", honestly. The Bride could probably have been edited to run as a comedy and possibly be better for it, what with its bombastic energy that has a dance sequence (hey, if you have one Frankenstein-adjacent film go with the Ritz...) and the, uh, unintentional amusement of a bunch of people putting on garb to look like the title character (with a mantra of brain attack that-, no, wait, nobody will be saying that as a rallying cry, not even to enjoy ice cream) and cut tongues out. For a movie that is set in 1936, at least you will be able to enjoy the scenery every now and then, that much is true. But for all the attempts at dignity and intensity that doesn't want to be pegged as just being a wannabee Natural Born Killers (1994), Buckley and Bale can't save that sinking feeling of "I would prefer not to" when asked if they would say there is something that made you care about these folks. Every single time that Buckley goes to the Shelley Zone makes me giggle a tiny bit in the very idea that it is meant to be taken seriously as some sort of devastating blow for women. Bening* at least looks like she wants to be in a monster movie, while Sarasgaard and Cruz have little to actually do beside fight over who is more wooden. As predictable as it might seem, the movie begs for a real villain or something to root against more than just "the system" or "guy who doesn't say much but I guess it matters that he gets his due at the end" (to say nothing of Buckley's character having to be rescued from sexual assault twice). By the time the movie mashes to a conclusion of, well, something, at least you get the feeling of relief to wash over the disappointment to be had here. As fun as it would've been to call this movie a pile of garbage (hey, if you can't have fun...), I just felt that this was mostly a frustrating experience to go through. But if you like the idea of seeing what the fuss might be about a movie that believes it has something to say about people that happens to have a few people getting stomped, maybe it might be for you.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day

*oh how could I resist

*Crowd count for this movie at 10:45am: zero, which actually is not a new phenomenon for me, as it happened with Madame Web and, uh, Missing Link.

*Seriously though, am I the only one that sees her glasses as looking like Dana Carvey from Master of Disguise?