The Bride (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

Having rewatched Maggie Gyllenhaal's sophomore directorial feature thrice, I can now say with certainty it's a favorite. Her follow-up to The Lost Daughter continues her unexpected and artful approach to new feminist cinema, yet does radically, offensively different things than we might expect or even want. While it's not out to garner her many new fans -- except maybe those interested in classical horror -- anyone who buckles in for this insane, ballsy ride will experience a thrill unlike many others. 

Nominally inspired by Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the classic Universal comedy-horror sequel to its 1931 flagship cinematic phenomenon, The Bride harnesses its metafictional take on the story to great postmodern effect. We open with an onscreen narrator, seemingly the ghost of Mary Shelley. Jessie Buckley, in her commanding dual performance, stares balefully into the camera out of a black-and-white limbo with low-key lighting that shifts unexpectedly around her, droning on in a thick character voice about her torment. As a writer, she cannot rest, burdened by another story she meant to tell before her untimely death. How to tell it? Well, naturally, she'll possess a vulnerable woman -- apparently one in a similar state of mind and/or danger as she was in life -- and enact the story herself. 

Enter Ida (also played by Buckley), a young woman caught among the higher-ups of an organized crime boss in Chicago, 1936. She seems a flamboyant nightclub performer and likely escort for these dangerous men, and in her introductory scene she's being assaulted by lascivious older men. Taking her opportunity, Mary Shelley inserts herself, forcing Ida into a full trance-like possession state in which she moves twitchily and spills the beans of the crime boss's sins. Trying to rush her out of the stunned nightclub, two henchman end up cornering her on the stairs as they try to figure out what's wrong with her, and soon enough Ida falls down the stairs to her death. The violent sequence -- from verbal altercation to broken bones -- is stylized to the point of alienation, I suspect, from some viewers. But it's proof that Gyllenhaal is a true artist, making bold swings and risky choices rarely allowed to female artists; I wish more directors followed their passions and tried weird things.

That's not to say the material couldn't have used a bit more workshopping. The screenplay, penned by Gyllenhaal, inconsistently plots itself through lurching steps, much like the monsters it dramatizes. After this lengthy prologue, we shift suddenly to Frank (Christian Bale), the original Frankenstein's monster, now in Chicago himself and looking for a deeper human connection than any he's had in his long, lonely life. He approaches Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening, working fabulously from what could have been a miserably flat part to electrify her scenes) to request that she expand her work on reanimation to a full -- recently deceased -- human corpse. He only stipulates that the corpse be female. Thanks to Ida's recent demise, she's carted in and successfully returned to life.

Or whatever passes for life, anyway. She's still possessed by Shelley and, as we might expect, has her brain fried during her resurrection. Buckley has the seemingly impossible task of playing an English woman from 1818 possessing a very different Chicago woman in 1936 who has amnesia and thus a new persona: essentially three different characters in one, constantly shifting throughout her often incoherent monologues. As is thankfully becoming vogue in cinema, Buckley glories in her unrepentant, deliberately defiant character, a feminist icon who isn't afraid to be nasty and crude and lusty and rebellious against any constraints. A favorite moment is at her first meal, when she begins smashing tableware in an almost bored state, waiting for demands on her to cease.

One can only imagine how much physical therapy Buckley had to undergo, both for her voice -- her verbal athletics are olympian in scope and fervor -- and for her body, which moves in contorted, angular patterns even when she's not putting her weight on a shattered shin. After an initial rebellion, Ida accedes to Frank and the two embark on a hedonistic, criminal spree not unlike Bonnie and Clyde, finding solace in their isolation. More touching moments occur as they go from cinema to cinema, absorbing old Ginger Rogers movies. Frank especially loves Ronnie Reed, a Fred Astaire riff played by a slick and debonair Jake Gyllenhaal. Yet all is not well in paradise, and the couple is being investigated by two detectives in the form of Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz in what might the film's weakest subplot despite its eminent charm. 

This is a maximalist's movie, a cinephile's movie, and a movie for anyone who values excess of style. Building more from films noir than classic, theatrical cinema, Gyllenhaal injects rage into her humor and sickness into her sexiness, meshing candy-colored sin with grayscale grime in every shot. If Poor Things told this story in a surrealist fashion, and Joker (and Folie a Deux in particular) told it in realistic fashion, The Bride camps it up, making mockery of deadly serious matters while acknowledging its own absurdity. And then there's the ending, which after a countrywide chase, resolves things in an unexpected and perhaps unearned happy way. I loved it. By film's end, I was exhausted from sheer imaginative joy and did not want a tragic denouement. And Gyllenhaal knowingly gives us what we need more than what we deserve in the film's final moments. It may not ring true to the world she's so painstakingly built up to that point, but it feels damn good. 

Good for her.