JESSIE BUCKLEY IN THE BRIDE!

TRAILER

Creatures on the run

Beware the title that has an exclamation point at the end of it: something's probably wrong. This time more like everything: this movie is totally incoherent and those who stick with it through its entire two-iplus hours will get few rewards. This so-to-speak "reassessment" of Mary Shelley's work and "a bonkers feminist call-to-arms" (as NME puts it) wastes Jessie Buckley's considerable talents in the leads as Ida, The Bride, and Mary Shelley, as well as those of the others involved. Those include Annette Bening as Dr. Euphronious, Christian Bale as the Creature or the Monster, here domesticated and addressed as Frank; Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as a Thirties detective team, as well as Maggie Gyllenhaal's brother Jake, John Magaro and various others who are wandering around in this catastrophically meandering tale.

How it is a blow for feminism for there to be a female Frankenstein monster with a female mad scientist to craft her is a point that lost me right at the beginning. But that's the way it goes. Every underrepresented group wants to have representation on all sides of the spectrum, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is never out of fashion. And after all, Mary Shelley was a woman. So we need a female monster and a movie directed by a woman about her.

NME calls the film "an outlier in the Frankenstein canon," and admits "They don’t come much wilder and weirder." But that's just a nice way of saying this is a mess. Film critic Johnny Oleksinski of The New York Post, a newspaper that does not mince its words, calls The Bride! "one of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job." A Metacritic citizen critic wrote, "the feminist overtones or should we say overt-tones makes it a cringe fest, most female characters are as you would expect in such a story, insufferable." This points to a major aspect of this film's failure, its effort to illustrate all kinds of things that are never integrated into fluent storytelling. The one positive thing is the film's colorful evocation of 1930s America, which is a visual delight.

Things start out well enough, with the Frankenstein monster's well-known loneliness and desire for a mate. It's the fact that this desire can't be fulfilled that makes the original tale pathetic and compelling, awakens our sympathy for the pitiful, hideous creature. As The Bride! begins, the Creature in his loneliness has made his way to 1930s Chicago, where he finds Dr. Euphronious and begs her to fashion a mate for him. This mad lady scientist and her laboratory would seem over-the-top had we not just witnessed Guillermo del Toro's more palatial Frankenstein workshop a few months ago. While del Toro's craftsmanship is arguably over-elaborate, his film follows the Mary Shelley story unusually faithfully. We're on new, uncertain ground this time.

Gyllenhaal's Frankenstein Creature, played by Christian Bale, is a throwback to earlier versions, the more obviously so, and a disappointment, after the subtle, sympathetic, visually complex one fashioned in del Toro's film and so beautifully played by Jacob Elordi. With Bale's Monster we're back to the traditional big stitches across the face, the squarish head, the lumpish movements. Not very sexy. Dr. Euphronious domesticates him by calling him "Frank." This usage is jarring as are the many uses of F-words: the writing as a recreation of 1930s American English is tone-deaf from the get-go. "Frank's" new mate, played by Jessie Buckley, is similarly disappointing. She is a scruffy blonde with a big black smudge to one side of her mouth, who comes into being from a dug-up corpse in a great flash of static and light. What is to become of this couple? The chemistry is a dud.

It seems a failure how little visual invention appears in the handling of the two monsters or their interactions. Discussions of whether they will have sex or love founder. The filmmakers seem to be improvising as they go along, and, not knowing what to make of the couple they have created, resolve upon making much of the film into a Bonnie and Clyde story that clumsily develops out of this new unon, which soon turns lawless and murderous. Strangely, there are followers, who emulate the female Creature by wearing dark smudges to one side of their mouths too. The film uses Jessie Buckley rather awkwardly also to play Mary Shelley, who appears periodically to comment on the events.

And on and on. All this continues for far too long a time and never ceases to be chaotic. The only delight comes through the Thirties recreations. There is downtown Chicago at night and then downtown New York City at night. Both of them are full of neon and spectacular. The odd couple develops a peculiar relationship to the cinema and like to go to a movie after they've done something violent. This never makes much sense, but leads to several nice bits of mise-en-scène: frequenting the exciting big Times Square movie houses; then attending an early drive-in movie theater. These are two of the best images of the film.

The Bride! has no shortage of handsome images. Unfortunately the many closeups of the two creatures aren't among them. Nor are the interactions of the pair or all the trouble they create, or all the trouble officers of the law go to to track them down ever as interesting as the old cars and the spectacular period neon.

Jessie Buckley is the frontrunner in the Best Actress category at this year’s Oscars for her performance in Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025). She didn't need this. But she got it. You can skip it.

The Bride, 126 min., premiered in London Feb. 26, 2026, opening theatrically in many countries Mar. 4 and Mar. 5. Its Metacritic rating is 56%. In France its AlloCiné critics rating is 2.4=48%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.