The Bride!
The director Maggie Gyllenhaal brings a playful, full-blooded and eminently stylish touch to a familiar tale.
The Devil’s children: Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley
Image courtesy of Warner Bros.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
The Bride! is obviously a parody. But of what? Well, pretty much everything. If you can imagine Mel Brooks remaking Bonnie and Clyde in the style of that director’s cult favourite Young Frankenstein, you’d be way off the mark. There are songs, though, including a wild rendition of Irving Berlin’s ‘Puttin’ On the Ritz’ which is worthy of the stylistic insanity of the dance performed by Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things. So Yorgos Lanthimos. But it’s no coincidence that Berlin’s immortal number previously appeared in Young Frankenstein.
What is apparent from the start, though, is that the writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal and her leading lady Jessie Buckley are having inordinate fun. Jessie Buckley collected her first Oscar nomination for playing the young Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter, which marked Gyllenhaal’s debut as a filmmaker. Now Gyllenhaal has gifted Buckley with a role that is as diametrically opposed to the part of the serene, otherworldly Agnes in Hamnet as you can get. Not that the Bride is not otherworldly. Even before her untimely death at the film’s start, Ida – as in the 1930s’ movie star Ida Lupino (who later became an accomplished film director, natch) – seems like something possessed, a siren spat out of the very depths of Hell. It is 1936 in a Chicago nightclub where Ida is holding court in the midst of a pack of predatory men, unknowingly haunted by the spirit of Mary Shelley (she who wrote Frankenstein back in 1818). Adopting various voices, Ida enumerates the heinous crimes of a local mob boss, who happens to be called Lupino. The latter (Zlatko Burić) immediately orders her execution, which is duly enacted…
Following the prologue, we meet the guarded, gentlemanly Frank (Christian Bale) who approaches a pioneering scientist, Dr Euphronious (Annette Bening, channelling Diane Keaton), who has been experimenting with reanimation. It transpires that Frank is none other than Dr Frankenstein’s so-called Monster, who has spent the last century searching for companionship and can no longer bear his isolation. He was hoping Dr Euphronious could find him a bride, a woman, who like him who would be grateful to be resurrected from the grave. And Ida is still pretty fresh…
As this grotesque courtship proceeds, Frank introduces Ida – whom he names Penelope – to his love of the movies, in particular the musicals of one Ronnie Reed, played by a dapper, tap-dancing Jake Gyllenhaal (Maggie Gyllenhaal’s younger brother). As Frank and Penelope are reduced to a life of crime, they are pursued by a cop called Jake, played by Peter Sarsgaard who, in real life, happens to be married to Maggie Gyllenhaal. Not uncoincidentally, Jake’s new partner is played by Penélope Cruz. Neither is it an accident that the hitman contracted to kill Ida again, lets slip that his wife is called Annette.
There is so much going on in The Bride! that there is probably something for everyone, at least anyone with a strong stomach. There’s music (and a great score by Hildur Guðnadóttir), dance, shoot-outs, car chases, limericks and an erotic charge not felt since the release of “Wuthering Heights”. But for all this, it is the no-holds-barred performance of Jessie Buckley that powers the film, being a symphony of emotions, of lust, rage, love and seduction, while in an uncharacteristic turn Christian Bale brings a solemnity, dignity and poignancy to the Creature who has for so long been denied a mate.
There is more than a touch of “Wuthering Heights” about The Bride!, it being a highly eroticised reinvention of a sacred 1800s’ text written and directed by a former actress-turned-filmmaker. You couldn’t make this up. For never was there a story so fine/As that of The Bride – and her Frankenstein.
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz, John Magaro, Matthew Maher, Jeannie Berlin, Zlatko Burić, Louis Cancelmi, Julianne Hough.
Dir Maggie Gyllenhaal, Pro Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Talia Kleinhendler and Osnat Handelsman-Keren, Screenplay Maggie Gyllenhaal, from the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, Ph Lawrence Sher, Pro Des Karen Murphy, Ed Dylan Tichenor, Music Hildur Guðnadóttir, Costumes Sandy Powell, Dialect coaches Tim Monich and Jessica Drake.
First Love Films/In the Current Company-Warner Bros.
126 mins. USA. 2026. UK and US Rel: 6 March 2026. Cert. 15.
