Wednesday, March 4, 2026
The Bride!
Set in 1930s Chicago, the film follows Frank (Christian Bale), a lonely and ancient monster who travels to the city seeking a companion. He enlists the help of the brilliant, unconventional scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to revive a murdered young woman. The woman, first seen as Ida (Jessie Buckley), is reborn as the Bride: newborn, electric, and ferociously alive. What follows is part gothic romance, part radical awakening, as the Bride refuses to simply become what Frank and the world around her expect. Together, the two find themselves as outlaws on the run, their volatile romance echoing the legendary recklessness of Bonnie and Clyde, careening through the night with law enforcement in pursuit and a growing cultural movement forming in their wake.
Jessie Buckley is simply magnificent in the dual role. Playing Ida as a sharp and tenacious woman ground down by a world that only permits a sliver of her, and then the Bride, reborn with an almost supernatural hunger for truth, autonomy, and love, she carries the film on her considerable shoulders. Where Elsa Lanchester's iconic original bride character was given barely three minutes and not a single coherent word in "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), Jessie Buckley's Bride is a force of nature: fierce, vulnerable, irrational, sexy, and utterly ungovernable all at once. It is a performance that contains multitudes, and you cannot take your eyes off her.
Christian Bale is equally compelling as Frank, a monster who has been alive for over a century and has spent most of it quietly bleeding with regret. He brings a startling gentleness to the role, buried beneath 25 individually applied prosthetic pieces that reportedly took up to seven hours to apply each day. The chemistry between Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley crackles from their first scene together. Their relationship, built on a lie, sustained by genuine need, and eventually detonated by truth, is the beating heart of the film.
Where the film stumbles is in its second half, when detectives Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz) move closer to the foreground. Penélope Cruz brings wit and quiet dignity to a woman perpetually underestimated by the men around her. But the procedural mechanics of the investigation feel like they belong to a different, slightly more conventional film. Each new scene tracking their movements risks deflating the anarchic, romantic momentum that Frank and the Bride have built. The story of the Bride simply does not need much competition for our attention, and the film would benefit from trusting that more fully. Trimming this subplot would sharpen it considerably.
Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal's passion for cinema runs through the film like a live wire. One of its most charming conceits is that Frank finds solace and joy in the movies, specifically in the golden-age musicals and matinee idols that play out on the screens of 1930s Chicago. Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), a fictional Hollywood star, becomes Frank's window into another, brighter world. The film wears its love of cinema openly and warmly, referencing Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and the mythic outlaw glamour of Bonnie and Clyde, and these touches give the otherwise gothic narrative a surprising and delightful lightness.
Cinematographer Lawrence Sher's innovative use of IMAX, expanding the frame not for spectacle but for emotional and surreal effect, is genuinely new. Sandy Powell's costume work is an instant gallery of icons: the Bride's vivid orange dress punk and alive against the dark Chicago nights, and Penélope Cruz's sharp scarlet dress so boldly, passionately red it feels lifted straight from the world of Pedro Almodóvar.
This movie is wild, romantic, monstrous, and deeply human all at once. It is a film about saying "I would prefer not to" and meaning it, about the parts of ourselves we try to lock away, and about learning to love them. Maggie Gyllenhaal has made something genuinely new from one of the oldest stories in the book.
"The Bride!" opens in theaters on Friday, March 6, 2026.
