The Bride! is so abrasively terrible that you just sort of feel bad for everybody involved, including yourself, while watching it. It truly is a task to get through its two-hour-plus running time—a cinematic pain gauntlet for the ages.
I am always rooting for writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, a true talent who was clearly shooting for something groundbreakingly unique with her take on the creations of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.
It’s a monster movie. It’s a sort-of musical. It’s an homage to seemingly every Frankenstein movie ever made. It’s a Bonnie and Clyde-style action thriller. Above all, it’s a movie in which a lot of people screech, cackle and moan spastic dialogue to the point of being intolerable.
Jessie Buckley is asked to inhabit one of the most annoying characters ever put to celluloid in Ida, a mysterious woman in the 1930s who hangs around with the wrong crowd and winds up dead. Then she hangs around with another bad crowd when she’s undead, all while being possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley. If that sounds incomprehensibly weird and stupid, that’s because it is.
Christian Bale plays the original Frankenstein’s monster (known here as Frank for short), and he’s just out of place. His performance comes off as somebody trying to provide an anchor in the mayhem. There were moments in this movie when the tone of his work seems to be screaming, “Oh, can we please have some order here! Is there no room for an earnest performance?”
Also attached to this catastrophe is Annette Bening as this film’s version of Dr. Frankenstein, here called Dr. Euphronious. She’s visited by Frank, who shortly after meeting her requests a wife. Dr. Euphronious builds one up in the lab using Ida’s body, and this fiasco is set in motion as the two run off on their adventures.
Those adventures include some requisite killings, a dance number that is set to “Putting on the Ritz” (the same song from Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein), and an “man, I wish I wasn’t watching this” sex scene. Oh, I forgot to mention this is also a detective thriller starring Peter Sarsgaard (Maggie’s husband) and Penelope Cruz as two gumshoes pursuing the beasts.
All of this action goes down with Buckley speaking in some sort of gloomy British accent when she’s channeling Shelley, and sort of sounding like Jessie Buckley when in pure Ida mode. Buckley is going to win an Oscar at this year’s ceremonies, a well-deserved award for Hamnet. I also predict she will win a Razzie next year for 2026’s worst films, when this movie is sure to dominate in many categories. She’s a top-notch actress, but what she’s done here is a discombobulated, straining, irritating, punishingly bad creation. It will surely stand as one of the worst things she will ever do in a movie.
Maggie’s brother, Jake, lands the film’s most interesting part as an old-timey movie musical star who Frank has come to admire. Jake gets to hoof and sing in a way that makes you wish this was simply an homage to black-and-white movie musicals with Jake at the center. Forget the stupid monsters; Jake is giving Fred Astaire a run for his money in this thing.
I’d been looking forward to this movie since it, and its amazing cast, were announced a couple of years ago. How can you miss with Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale playing the Bride and Frankenstein’s monster?
Welp, The Bride! is a thesis in exactly how to do that: Stuff your narrative with way too many threads; have your main character be inexplicably possessed by its initial creator; instruct the person playing that role to be as irritating as humanly possible; and strand Bale in pounds of prosthetic makeup. Viola! Not only do you have an epic miss; you also have an early contender for 2026’s worst film.
The Bride’s makeup on her mouth looks cool.