The Bride! Review: Frankenstein’s Riot Grrrl

In punk cinema, you’re either a Derek Jarman or an Alex Cox. Jarman was a master of subversive control, a genius in finding beauty in ugliness and perversion in the divine. Alex Cox threw everything at the wall and hoped something stuck.

There are moments in The Bride!, writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s violent, stylized revamp of the story of the woman created for a man-made monster, that feel like Jarman in their ecstatic mix of carelessness and meticulous artistry. Unfortunately, they are quickly drowned in a hodgepodge of borrowed pop culture nods delivered with the over-excitement of a bunch of well-funded theatre kids.

Mary Shelley, of course, had nothing to do with the creation of the Bride, that being John L. Balderston’s addition to the script for the 1935 Universal Horror classic, The Bride of Frankenstein. But in Gyllenhaal’s febrile reimagining, Shelley (Jessie Buckley) has been stewing for centuries in the afterlife, until she worms her way back into the land of the living through the reanimated corpse of a Capone-era Chicago gangster’s moll named Ida (Buckley again). Ida’s return to life, with Shelley along for the ride as a rude possessing spirit, comes when a mad scientist, Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) revives her as a bride for Frankenstein (Christian Bale), who is actually Frankenstein’s Monster but just goes as Frank now.

Sometimes, The Bride! succeeds in its visual and thematic exuberance, like the shadow-shrouded Shelley in her black-and-white limbo, her lip curled in arch fury at the pettiness of men. Yet too often it’s merely a bunch of cool shit thrown at the wall, and little really sticks. After Ida shoots a cop, the duo go on a Bonnie and Clyde-esque crime spree. Sorry, make that Bonnie and Clyde, since Gyllenhaal insists on elbowing the audience hard in the ribs that she’s seen Arthur Penn’s bloody anti-romance. At the point that Bale’s Frank bursts into a rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” because, you know, they do that in Young Frankenstein, it’s clear that all the pop culture flavors that Gyllenhaal is trying to blend together will never truly meld. It’s a hyper-extended early Panic! At the Disco video, clogged up with homages and references.

That dedication to making comparisons rather than subverting those earlier works with commentary means The Bride!’s third-wave feminist political text never truly resolves into much beyond sloganeering and symbolism. Gyllenhaal makes her points about the oppression of women far more succinctly and effectively with a secondary plot about incompetent Chicago detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, the far more capable Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz). Meanwhile, Ida’s call to arms for oppressed women, set against the background of her and Frank’s crime spree, plays out like a less caustic version of Natural Born Killers.

Infuriatingly, one major plot point is resolved in a mid-credit stinger, a late reminder that Gyllenhaal seems less interested in her story than in stuffing sub-Samuel Beckett, rambling alliterative dialogue into Buckley’s mouth every time she’s possessed by Shelley.

There are flashes of greatness, especially when Gyllenhaal and cinematographer Lawrence Sher capture some of the film’s wilder set-pieces. But then the narrative messiness undercuts the beauty of those images. Moreover, Bale and Buckley rarely seem to be in the same film. When they’re simpatico, there’s a bracing sadness to their savage romance. But there are just too many moments in which Bale embraces melodrama and Buckley is chomping down on the scenery in a “more is simply more” fashion that simply highlights the film’s hastily stitched nature.

The Bride!

2026, R, 127 min. Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jeannie Berlin.

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

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