For my second review of today, here comes The Bride!, a new interpretation of Bride of Frankenstein directed and written by Maggie Gyllenhaal which stars Jessie Buckley as Ida, a mobster’s girlfriend once murdered who’s resurrected by Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale) so that he may have a companion. But as Frank and his Bride cause chaos across 1936 Chicago and New York, they fall foul of police detective Jake Wiles, whose connection to Ida may be deeper than she can remember. Over the years, there have been a number of cases of “twin films” where multiple releases with the similar subject matter come out within close proximity of each other, including the likes of asteroid apocalypses Deep Impact and Armageddon, animated supervillain protagonists with Despicable Me and Megamind and White House set Die Hard clones with Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. The four and a half months between October 2025 and March 2026 have seen the release of two new, very different new versions of Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, one a straight adaptation of the original novel from Guillermo del Toro, and the other a reimagining of the original horror sequel from 1935 from Maggie Gyllenhaal (which had its release date pushed back to avoid competing with del Toro’s).
New Screenplay, Old Story
The base idea of reframing Bride of Frankenstein did certainly have potential considering that the titular character was only on screen for 5 minutes originally, and it’s that angle which ends up being the narrative’s strongest. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s screenplay constructs an engaging relationship between The Bride and Frank, with the former having lost her memory following her resurrection and being forced into her role to satiate his loneliness after over a century since his creation. It’s a dynamic which is constantly evolving as The Bride begins constructing an identity for herself, that’s filled with a resentment for the violence she sees other women bear witness to at the hands of the mob and that he himself is able to commit as well as a genuine love for Frank despite his self-serving manipulations. However, the most fundamental flaw in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s hypothesis for The Bride! is that it simply has too many concepts it’s trying to explore and trying to fit them into a 2 hour runtime results in a film that’s wildly overstuffed.
Commited Performances
Despite the issues of the script, the cast give impressively committed performances that take big swings, especially Jessie Buckley as The Bride. Her magnetic screen presence is put to great use and you truly buy her as the unpredictable, furious instigator of a revolution she ends up becoming and also a woman who’s lost all semblance of her original self, though her turn as Shelley is far less successful in part due to her exaggerated English accent, and her work as a whole isn’t quite as strong as her turn in Hamnet. Christian Bale meanwhile brings his trademark physicality to his turn as Frank, whose brutish strength masks a deep loneliness from spending a century walking the earth and a charming fandom for the work of film star Ronnie Reed (a criminally underused Jake Gyllenhaal).
Overall
Though a lot of the fundamentals in The Bride!’s marriage are admirable, Gyllenhaal’s overambition ultimately lead to it being an unsuccessful union on account of its litany of underdeveloped strands, wasted supported cast and overall lack of restraint, though the things it succeeds at will probably be enough to give it a strong procession in the years to come.
2/5 stars
The Bride! movie review was created by Joe Warne, a member of the Sedgemoor fm team since 2017.
Joe specialises in providing weekly reviews of the latest film releases at 6.30pm each Monday evening as part of the Sedgemoor Life Show. Tune in each Monday for more movie reviews