There’s something undeniably thrilling about watching a filmmaker swing this hard.
From Maggie Gyllenhaal – whose directorial debut The Lost Daughter announced a fierce and precise new voice – The Bride! arrives as a bold, operatic reimagining of Mary Shelley’s mythos. On paper, it’s intoxicating: a 1930s Chicago-set fever dream starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, reframing the Bride of Frankenstein as a radical truth-telling antihero born from male loneliness and cultural rot.
In execution? It’s a bizarre, beautiful disaster.
Gyllenhaal deserves real praise for audacity. She takes a story so embedded in pop culture – a character who, in the 1935 film, barely speaks – and explodes it outward into a manifesto about agency, monstrousness, and the violence of male entitlement. It’s intellectually provocative, thematically rich, and formally fearless. But somewhere between the operatic ambition and the genre-blurring experimentation, the film collapses under the weight of its own intent.
It has no idea what it wants to be.
Is it gothic horror? Tragic romance? Camp musical? Political satire? Grindhouse fantasia? Prestige psychodrama? At various points, it is all of these – and none of them convincingly. The tonal whiplash is severe. One moment, we’re in a smoky Depression-era melodrama; the next, we’re plunged into stylised musical interludes and full-blown dance numbers that feel imported from an entirely different film. These sequences are committed – aggressively so – but they land with a thud, disrupting rather than deepening the emotional arc.
It becomes hard not to think of Joker: Folie à Deux – another sequel/spiritual reworking that mistook audacity for cohesion, and spectacle for emotional clarity. Like that film, The Bride! feels like it is at war with itself: determined to subvert expectation, but unsure what to replace it with.
Buckley throws herself into the chaos with admirable ferocity. Her performance is raw, theatrical, uncontained. She plays The Bride as feral prophet, wounded child, erotic force, and avenging angel – often within the same scene. It’s a performance of extremes. Some will find it electrifying. Others will find it exhausting. There is no middle ground. She commits to the mess, even when the film cannot support her.
Bale, as the lonely, morally compromised Frank, brings his usual intelligence and emotional volatility. But his arc feels strangely undercooked, as though key psychological beats were sacrificed for symbolism. The relationship between Frank and The Bride – built on lies and longing – should be tragic and combustible. Instead, it feels schematic.
More frustrating is how thoroughly underutilised Annette Bening is as Dr. Euphronious. Someone as revered as her cast as the radical scientist who makes resurrection possible should be dynamite. Instead, she’s relegated to exposition and occasional gravitas, her presence never fully integrated into the narrative’s escalating chaos.
And then there’s Jake Gyllenhaal – entirely wasted in a role that seems to exist more as an idea than a character. For a film so invested in big personalities and operatic flourishes, it’s baffling how many of its actors are left stranded; Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz similarly navigating undercooked roles as a duo of detectives tailing Frank and The Bride for the majority of the film, honing motivation that never feels consistent.
The core issue is this: The Bride! feels trapped between the real world and fantasy. It wants to be grounded in Depression-era grit and psychological realism, but it also wants to be mythic, surreal, and iconographic. It refuses to commit fully to either. As a hybrid, it never coheres. The realism feels interrupted by spectacle; the spectacle feels embarrassed by realism.
What’s left is something undeniably original – and deeply alienating.
There’s a version of this film that works: one that either embraces full camp-gothic musical delirium, or strips back to a raw, intimate tragedy about truth and monstrousness. Instead, we get a film that gestures in every direction at once, mistaking maximalism for depth. And yet – it’s not boring. Not remotely. It’s fascinating to watch something this personal, this unfiltered, this determined to reject convention. In a franchise landscape addicted to safety, that’s worth acknowledging. This is a win for original vision.
It’s just also an inexplicable stumble.
Audiences expecting horror will be bewildered. Those expecting romance may feel stranded. Those hoping for intellectual drama may grow impatient with the theatrical flourishes. Many may reject it outright. And perhaps that rejection is part of its DNA – a film about radical truth-telling that dares viewers to recoil.
The Bride! is a monster of its own making: ambitious, unruly, occasionally beautiful – and ultimately undone by its inability to decide what kind of creature it wants to be.
TWO STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Bride! is now screening in Australian theatres.
*Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures.
