The Bride! arrives this week, and the delay in its release—it was originally slated for fall 2025—makes perfect sense. That’s not just because the shift put distance between Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Bride of Frankenstein retelling. It’s also because we are in the era of Jessie Buckley. She’s the frontrunner to pick up a Best Actress Oscar for her harrowing performance in Hamnet, but truthfully, her multi-character turn in The Bride! is even more ferocious.
Multi-character, because Buckley also plays the film’s narrator of sorts: Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. In the 1930s, the late author gets a wild hair to craft a sequel to her gothic novel. Because Mary is directing events from the afterlife, her approach is not through pen and paper but by possessing a troubled Chicago woman named Ida, whose madcap life takes a turn for the bizarre at this intrusion.
Meanwhile, Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) has become so agonizingly lonely in his century of undead existence that he seeks out the eccentric Dr. Euphronius (a wonderfully wry Annette Bening). She really doesn’t mind being called a mad scientist—and requires only minimal prodding to help Frank rob a grave so she can “reinvigorate” a bride for him.
The lucky lady is, of course, Ida, who has perished after plunging down a set of stairs. (Frank worries that she’s too beautiful, even in death, to fall for a guy like him.) Ida proves remarkably easy to revive, though the fierce British woman who’s taken over half her brain makes her situation even more disorienting than it already is. She doesn’t remember her life as Ida, including a connection to Chicago’s underworld that becomes important as The Bride! continues. And she doesn’t initially question the idea that she’s survived an “accident,” which Frank and the doctor say explains her curious injuries. For most of the movie, in other words, she doesn’t realize she’s actually dead.
In the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein film, featuring Elsa Lanchester as both Mary Shelley and the monster’s mate, the female creature springs to life at the very end of the film. She screams and hisses in abject horror and disgust; Frankenstein’s monster, who’s been longing for companionship the entire time, sizes up the situation and realizes, famously, that “We belong dead” and ends things right there.
That’s not what happens in The Bride!, which not only fills us in on who Ida was before she died but also carves out an entire existence once she’s thrashing her way through the world as “Penelope,” as Frank starts calling her. She may be a reanimated corpse, but she’s a vividly drawn character who’s bursting with life and very little impulse control. Part of that is Mary’s influence, but it’s also the result of being repeatedly controlled, threatened, and abused by men—cops, gangsters, random sleazeballs on the dance floor. There are human monsters everywhere she turns. No wonder she feels the urge to punch back, and The Bride! leans all the way in when a vicious response is required.
The Bride! aims to position its main character as a revolutionary feminist figure, and it squares that with the basic premise of the movie—a woman is chosen to be a bride—by making Frank more vulnerable than expected. He’s respectful of her boundaries, but he’ll fight to protect her, and he’s a dreamer at heart, with a soft spot for fizzy musicals starring Hollywood dreamboat Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal in a fun supporting turn). He’s also oozing with as much body horror as a stitched-together person must be.
Without the romance anchoring The Bride!, its many in-your-face elements might get a little tiresome. There are spontaneous dance numbers, gun battles, angry mobs with torches, a detective duo (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz) chasing after the rampaging monsters in what feels like their own separate movie, and a whole plot about corruption and mobsters that also feels a bit underbaked.
But the energy throughout is electric—good news for anyone who thought del Toro’s Frankenstein was gorgeous but airless—and the film’s subversive interpretation not just of The Bride of Frankenstein but also of 1930s cinema and culture is dazzling. We could not be farther in style and story from Gyllenhaal’s last movie, family drama The Lost Daughter, and her confident filmmaking propels The Bride!’s wild swings to impressive effect.
And while The Bride! eventually finds that tender connection between Ida and Frank—hard-earned and well-earned—the movie is at its very best when it’s focused on Ida’s awakening. With her face and lips artfully stained by Dr. Euphronius’ reanimation fluid, her way of fashioning quirky accessories from scraps of fabric to enhance the tattered dress she was buried in, her fondness for quoting Melville, and her erratic, occasionally homicidal behavior, Ida is about as far from a trope as a character can get.
The movie goes full-tilt for two hours, and you may be exhausted by the end—but Gyllenhaal and Buckley absolutely prove that sometimes the most audacious choices are the exact right ones.
The Bride! opens in theaters March 6.
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