The premise of The Bride! is hidden from its advertising. Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal opens on Mary Shelley (an acidic Jessie Buckley) stuck in a black-and-white purgatory of sorts, only her face visible. She’s lit sporadically by slow-pulsing lights, which reveal a wry smile matching the sneer in her voice. She informs viewers about the unintentionally tame nature of her original book, the grotesque version of Frankenstein she dreamt up, and the desires behind the sequel we’re about to watch. The Bride!—”A ghost story, a horror story, or, most frighteningly, a love story,” as Shelley describes it—is the Frankenstein she wanted to write but didn’t get to.
Now in the afterlife, Shelley reawakens. She feels something cracking inside her (“A sequel is coming. Everything will change,” she warns), something she can crack in someone else, a woman named Ida (also Buckley), who finds a great deal of dissatisfaction in the small amount of dignity she’s allowed as a woman in 1936 Chicago. Thus, Shelley finds a way to kill Ida and reanimate her from the grave, infusing her new muse “Penny” with a brilliant, vile, vigorous, take-no-prisoners attitude that Frankenstein never had.
On the contrary, Frankenstein’s Monster, or Frank (Christian Bale) for short, is just the opposite: He’s a gentle, tender-loving man obsessed with Golden Age Hollywood musicals and suffocated by the loneliness he’s endured for 117 years as a monster walking the Earth, who looks much more horrific than Guillermo del Toro’s steely blue Elordi rendition. Frank is also part of this world’s lore; everyone in The Bride! and their mother is so familiar with the story of Frankenstein that they find his sudden appearance confusing to say the least, if not falsified.
Frank tracks down Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) with the hopes of commissioning her to resurrect a partner for him, for companionship more than carnal pleasures. She chides him (“We’ll find you a plucky redhead with big titties!”) before she begrudgingly agrees, and The Bride is born in a photo-negative flash of flourish. She’s unaware of who she was or what she is now, but she’s no less fiery for it. Frank and Euphronius lie to her, telling her she’s Frank’s fiancé. She spouts, shouts, and jerks around feverishly, possessed by the restless spirit of Shelley, quoting writers and literary texts like a tenured professor, iterating on words and ideas uncontrollably. She communes with the dead, speaking to Shelley in dreams, and quotes Scottish theologian John Knox with her motto: “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”
Gyllenhaal assembles a superstar crew for her sophomore feature, and the tact and imagination of the veterans at work makes the bold, boundless vision of The Bride! possible. The team includes longtime Paul Thomas Anderson editor Dylan Tichenor, Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, Martin Scorsese costume designer Sandy Powell, Baz Luhrmann production designer Karen Murphy, and lead producers known for late-era Scorsese and Israeli firebrand Nadav Lapid. Per the Lapid producers—whom Gyllenhaal connected with while leading a 2018 English-language remake of The Kindergarten Teacher, a movie too difficult to stomach for many—there is no doubt that The Bride! understands its own divisive nature. Some will find its crass approach and overt feminist messaging garish, even if they agree with it. At its worst, The Bride! can indeed be heavy-handed. But its indelicate vulgarities and in-your-face politicking are all part of its construction, meant to push viewers’ buttons. (Gyllenhaal dedicates the film to her daughters, and, in that sense, one can see the instructive storybook qualities in its DNA).
The wild violence and audacious artistry in Gyllenhaal’s comedy-romance-horror —a sharp left turn away from the subtle observation that grounded 2021’s The Lost Daughter—is on shocking display from the moment we meet The Bride as Ida, who’s killed by mob henchmen she dares say “no” to. They slap and punch her around, eventually whacking her down a staircase. In slow motion, she snaps her neck and leg as a black-and-white portal appears, hovering around her with afterlife ambience, signaling Shelley’s god-like hand at work. Later, in her first move as The Bride, she takes excitedly to a freaky dancefloor, only to be groped and grabbed into a fury (for the first, but not the last, time), sparking the murders that send Frank and Penny on the run.
They flee from Chicago to New York City to Niagara Falls, pursued by a pair of sly detectives (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz) who have their own misogynistic narrative at play. Along the way, Frank and Penny follow the settings of Frank’s favorite Ronnie Reed films. He adores Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal, delightful under his sister’s guiding hand)—a fictional Fred Astaire who sings Irving Berlin songs and tap-dances gleefully—just like Penny adores confrontation, be it constructive with Frank (“Wanna fuck?”) or destructive with a stranger forcing his hand under a woman’s skirt in a movie theater. Together, the monsters run amok. They kill thugs and cops, spark a new wave of eccentric reanimated dancing at a swanky party, and draw the attention of the media, the authorities, and the public. It isn’t long before the disobedient geometry of Penny has ignited a Joker-like revolution of “murderous dolls” made up of silenced women. They wear black wedding veils and ink-blot makeup on one side of their mouths, like The Bride, and take the abusive men in their lives captive.
Gyllenhaal never tones down the brutality, ripping us through bloody tongues, heads, and bodies—in cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s fit of gorgeously captured violence—until the frenzied finish. Likewise, Shelley sticks around until the bitter end, cackling her way through the story she puppeteers. As another English novelist once wrote, “The dead don’t die. They look on and help.”
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Writer: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz.
Release Date: March 6, 2026
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