Credit where credit is due: Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! did not leave me indifferent. I was often bored, and my reaction was frustration, but by God, I had emotions. That's not nothing.
Written and directed by Gyllenhaal, who is a smart and nuanced actor with a terrific first film under her belt, The Bride! is an infuriating, meandering mess that hides behind its girlbossification.
Its approach is scattershot, to say the least. The Bride! begins as a riff on the latter part of Mary Shelley's novel, where Frank (Christian Bale) seeks a companion for his afterlife. He discovers Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), who has mastered the secrets of life and death. Together, they excavate the corpse of Ida (Jessie Buckley), a recently murdered woman with ties to the local mafia, and set out to will both life and love into existence.
Then it becomes a Guillermo del Toro pastiche as Frank seeks a connection to humanity through the magic of cinema. If you saw The Shape of Water, you'll recognize the homework. From there, we scurry into a road movie that openly cribs from Warren Beattie's Bonnie and Clyde, right down to a climactic scene in all its glory.
Around the main narrative is a poorly thought-out variation on Joker, where the Bride's violent tendencies spark a revolution (with a full newspaper headline reading "Girl Rrrrrrriot!"), complete with matching makeup. Elsewhere, a crooked cop (Peter Sarsgaard) and his partner (Penélope Cruz) navigate the patriarchal 30s while hot in pursuit of the killer couple.
It's a lot, and even at two hours in length, The Bride! doesn't hold together at all. I admire that Gyllenhaal wants to throw everything she can into the picture, but so little of the film connects on an emotional level that the rest feels superfluous.
Worse, Gyllenhaal allows her actors to lean into their worst tendencies, resulting in what are quite possibly their first genuinely bad performances.
As Frankie, Bale's Austrian accent comes and goes as irregularly as his limp, and he delivers most of his lines via what I can only describe as mumble screaming. Granted, he has very little to do with the limited role, especially as Gyllenhaal's sprawling script struggles to focus on any one character.
Buckley fares no better, going for the big and loud theater kid at their first recital style in every single scene. She plays both Mary Shelley and the Bride. Her version of the former is a malevolent spirit, a mixture of psychosis and Tourette's (played with exactly the kind of subtlety and empathy you'd expect). She can see the past, present, and future, and you best believe that comes up more than once to ensure that everyone in the audience knows what the film wants to say.
The Bride, on the other hand, is half revolutionary and half a vessel for undercooked yet overwritten dialogue that shuns subtext as if it were the plague. It's a good thing The Bride! has an ample production budget, because Buckley chews every bit of scenery she can get her hands on.
Neither Buckley nor Bale is good in the film, but if you're going for the most performance, you'll find that here.
The Bride! takes place in the 1930s, yet Gyllenhaal gets very little out of her rich scenery and time period. Occasional bits do leave an impression, like a random dance number during a getaway. But it's extravagant in a way that draws attention to the act rather than the emotion. It says "look what we can do" instead of what the characters are feeling.
Similarly, The Bride! reduces Mary Shelley into an odd goth-caricature trapped in a void with nothing to her name but Frankenstein. It strips away her other works, her conflicted views of paternal relationships present in her books, and whittles it all down to an echo of an enraged scream about unrealized potential.
Like Kenneth Branagh's trite and egotistical version of Shelley's nuanced work, The Bride! tampers with the text without understanding the spirit, and the results fall equally flat.
Then there's the way the film treats neurodiversity or physical and mental ailments. I don't believe Gyllenhaal is malicious at all, but her fascination with the superficial hurts nonetheless. She has plenty of empathy for the idea of womanhood and oppression under the patriarchy, but it rarely extends beyond a singular, extremely limited scope of who that person is. If the film weren't so vocal about its themes of rebellion, these omissions wouldn't stand out as much.
Quite frankly, I'm tired of affluent cisgender filmmakers using queerdom as their personal safari when they need a shorthand for easy shock value. The Bride's interest in subcultures ends at the point that allows the most vanilla audiences to feel as if they've seen something scandalous.
Here, it's an underground variant of Cabaret, shot with an exploitative lens that's more Todd Browning than the Baz Luhrmann it desires. But it's 2026, we've had Frankenstein porn for decades now, and filmmakers like Julia Ducournau exist.
The Bride! exists in a supremely heteronomative space that, like Wuthering Heights, wants to elicit a reaction by sexing up a classic novel. But like Emerald Fennel's tedious adaptation, The Bride! refuses to take any chances to achieve it. Instead, it goes for timid shocks and vague platitudes that make for great gifs on social media and very little else.
It is a well-polished, finely tuned product by talented individuals that doesn't work. There's no shame in that, and some might even enjoy it.
But, to paraphrase the film: I'd rather not.
