I wanted to love The Bride! but it was too much of a monster mash

The Bride! is a messy monster mash-up movie that’s more vibes and bombastic quotes than the rousing and revolutionary film experience I hoped for.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did, although there is still something to admire.

Maggie Gyllenhaal has gone in a completely different direction for the follow-up film to her feature-length debut The Lost Daughter in 2021.

It’s bold, it’s detailed and it’s intensely theatrical in a way that will turn some audience members off.

This film also has a lot to say, leading to some lurches in storytelling alongside its already quite jarring style – but I am glad it exists in the world as part of a major studio’s 2026 cinematic output, confirming there’s still space for these kinds of big swings.

Focusing on Frankenstein author Mary Shelley alongside her creations of the ‘Monster’ and his Bride with obvious love, star Jessie Buckley gets the same double casting as actress Elsa Lanchester did in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein. But this time she is given a voice to declare loudly ‘here comes the mother****ing bride!’, which quite quickly confirms the direction this film is heading in.

However, this Bride’s voice is muddled between its two personalities after Mary rather inexplicably possesses 1930s goodtime girl Ida while on a night out, before she dies in an accident.

Later, Ida’s is the body dug up from a pauper’s grave by Frankenstein (played by Christian Bale and choosing to compound the common name confusion with his creator) and reanimation expert Dr Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening), to be his companion.

The eccentric Euphronius is convinced by the sheer loneliness of Frankenstein to put aside any personal misgivings when the mournful monster says hers is the first hand he’s shaken in over 100 years. He sends onlookers fleeing but hardly appears that hideous – although he smells horrendous. There’s also no beating around the bush that he’s incredibly horny too.

And when the Bride awakens after disappointingly little fanfare, she doesn’t remember anything – but is still possessed at irregular intervals by Mary, whose presence is announced by attacks of historical RP and revelling in a vocabulary that more earthy gal Ida doesn’t have rolling off the tip of her tongue.

Frankenstein and the Bride initially go out to a nightclub for a rather hazy first evening, which abruptly ends in violence and head stamping before they flee on a train to escape a mob. And while it’s intriguing to see these two reanimated corpses figure out their relationship, the performances from both ring a little shallow despite their huge talents.

Buckley is the frontrunner for best actress at the Oscars with Hamnet, but the Bride is a much flashier, shoutier turn which ultimately makes less impact, while Bale’s Frankenstein is a little pathetic and tough to root for – and streets apart from the tortured pain that Jacob Elordi delivered in the same part in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation last year.

But the blame for this lies less at their door than Gyllenhaal’s, who appears to have sacrificed substance for style in her characterisations and narrative.

Frankenstein is given some humanity through his love for musical movie star Ronnie Reed, heavily inspired by Fred Astaire and played by the director’s brother Jake Gyllenhaal; he gets to show off his best 30s crooner voice while Frankenstein forms an obsessive parasocial relationship with him, often imagining himself in his big numbers.

These Hollywood homages are some of the best scenes in the movie, including a wildly frenetic dance number to Puttin’ on the Ritz for both Bale and Buckley, which ends in a hold-up and makes a folk heroine out of the Bride and her angry ‘brain attack’ speech to panicked guests at a swanky club.

But it also struggles a bit to come together cohesively as a whole with other plot strands in The Bride!, like Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz’s detective duo on the monsters’ trail as bodies start to mount – although she’s technically his secretary because ‘lady detectives’ aren’t yet accepted, as the script is at pains to remind us.

The Bride! also has points it wants to push at the expense of other things, such as the fact it’s a hostile world for women, where the threat of sexual violence is never far and most men can’t be trusted unless they are an actual living-dead monster. It’s all a bit grim.

I’m aware of the irony of saying a film by a woman and largely for women is ‘too much’, but Gyllenhaal’s script leans a little too heavily into chaos and tearing up the rule book just because it can. A more disciplined narrative might have helped the clumsily obvious refrain of its female characters saying ‘I would prefer not to’ land with more oomph.

But for all its drama and cheesiness though, I celebrate its existence and am glad Warner Bros took the risk on it as there are parts to appreciate, including Gyllenhaal’s audacity as a filmmaker and the deliciously glam-goth vintage feast for the eyes courtesy of Sandy Powell’s costumes, Nadia Stacey’s make-up design and Karen Murphy’s production design.

But I couldn’t connect with it quite as much as I expected.

The Bride! is out in cinemas now.

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