The Bride!

As of 2026, there are over 450 versions of Frankenstein’s monsters on screen – making it a brave thing to try do differently. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is a fierce, weird, and ambitious take that brings a different story to life (literally): that of the monster’s bride. Replete with a stellar cast, it makes for a glitzy, action-packed, at times almost pantomime, yet overall enjoyable watch.

Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), back with his familiar stitched-up forehead and oversized suit, visits the mad scientist Dr Euphronius (Anette Bening) to seek a remedy to his eternal loneliness: a woman.

Enter the bride (Jessie Buckley). A rowdy gal reinvigorated from the dead, whose unshakable past enmeshed in the shady, criminal underworld of 1930’s Chicago follows her back into the land of the living. What unfolds is a Bonnie and Clyde type sprint as monster and bride outrun the Chicago police department (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz).

A rage-filled feminist critique of violence against women with echoes of the #MeToo movement, the film is jam-packed with conspiracy and corruption, ensconced in the glitz and glamour of show biz, with a literary metanarrative reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde to boot. Author Mary Shelley, infuriated by the patriarchy and desperate to see a female antihero disrupt the status quo, defies death to take possession of the bride, resulting in violent attacks on seedy men. Torrents of uncontrollable literary musings (to both amusing and annoying effect) spew from her ink-stained mouth.

If you haven’t already gathered, The Bride! is a hodgepodge assembly of plotlines. Violence against women, rage, loneliness, social upheaval, police corruption, possession, murder… it somehow also manages to ask (and not answer) Shakespeare’s question, ‘what is in a name?’

In the end, the inclusion of Mary Shelley in the film felt more like a director trying to justify her decision to make a spinoff, and the picking up and putting down of themes and ideas at times felt shallow (the thread of the monster overcoming loneliness and the brides lack of choice in being reinvigorated from the dead would’ve been enough to chew on).

Without Buckley’s incredible performance, I am not certain the film would hold. She is a rebellious and outrageous character with her frizzy white hair and jerky gait. While the plotlines are excessive, the movie moves quickly and the costumes are fabulous. Couple that with Bale’s humanity as Frankenstein’s monster and Buckley’s impressive physical performance and you have excellent cinema that is well worth the watch.