Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | March 6, 2026
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something black and bruised blue—Maggie Gyllenhaal’s exclamatory The Bride! is doing the herky-jerky Thriller dance into theaters this weekend with an entire wedding party’s worth of party gifts tucked into its silken, tattered stockings. Everything but the kitchen sink, so the saying goes, although I’m sure if you squinted that too would probably smack you upside the head, Looney-Tunes-style, like a brick in Bugs’s opera glove. Which is to say if you’re looking for subtlety or nuance you’ve come to the wrong theater—as the poetess Nicole Kidman puts it, “We come to this place for magic.” And Mags has conjured us up a truly strange spell with this beautiful and bewildering Baz-esque monstrosity.
Mashing together a century of cinema’s monsters and horror literature even before that, nobody’s gonna say about The Bride! that it doesn’t come to play, and play hard—nowhere more emphatic than in this year’s probable-Best-Actress-winner Jessie Buckley as the titular spouse in question. Pitching to the rafters so the rafters quiver in their place, this is definitely the sort of performance that the word “brave” should be tossed at, as opposed to the ones where a woman dares to put on a little less lipstick or actually eat a sandwich. Giving herself over body, throat and soul to Gyllenhaal’s vision, Buckley’s practically reckless, possessed— at this point it’s become a cliche to mention Isabelle Adjani’s freak-out scene in Andrzej Żuławski Possession when speaking of big acting, but just imagine all of that stretched out to feature-length.
I’m aware that people come to movie reviews to have a check placed next to either the “good” or the “bad” box, but what if we suggest an “other” here instead—this movie, as Colin Clive once shrieked towards James Whale’s rafters, is alive, alive, alive, that’s for sure, and it demands to be seen and experienced. It’s as if walking away from the sad, straightforward and mostly tasteful lit adaptation of Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter in 2021 (a movie I loved, mind you) terrified the actress-turned-director—and, much like The Bride herself, she refused to stay planted in that box, deciding instead to go for broke. Not just broke but broken, smashed to smithereens and glued back into a bizarre byzantine abnormality—ten arms, two to three heads, kneecaps akimbo. A seam that starts at the toes and zig-zags flesh and garters together.
But see, one can only want to skip ahead with something this electrically charged, as if every word I drop is getting the buzzer treatment—this is a movie that devoured William Castle’s electrified-seats gimmicks into its very being. So let’s try to wrangle, née untangle, Gyllenhaal’s tale into submission, which is to say summarization. As if.
Speaking from beyond the grave and filmed like Madonna in her “Vogue” video, first we meet Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (who, as with Elsa Lanchester in Whale’s classic Bride of Frankenstein, is also played by Buckley). And like in that 1935 sequel, Shelley’s got more to say—while her husband Percy and the poet Lord Byron were busy batting eyelashes at one another in the other room, she meant to continue her tale, dammit. (Of course Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is, in theory, a sequel to nothing, which is to say it’s a sequel to literally everything instead.) And so knowing full well that the only thing keeping the men in her life from taking off to screw each other is if she keeps talking, that’s what she does—here as before, she spins her tale of strange feminine fury, tearing holes through the fabric of life one lightning bolt at a time.
Indeed Frankenstein’s relationship to queerness has since inception been a rich and fascinating one, and Gyllenhaal thankfully knows that history full well (better than Guillermo Del Toro seemed to, since his recent adaptation kept infuriatingly scampering away from its feels between Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi)—no The Bride! is the most bisexual of the bunch, from its pink-and-blue lighting to its secret queer speakeasies to its leading man Frank’s (Christian Bale) understandably unfettered lust for Maggie’s brother, the Brokeback Mountain star Jake Gyllenhaal. (Jake slips in, top hat in hand, as a slick-haired movie-stud that Frank’s been crushing on for decades.) Here the rift in space-time is torn asunder by no less than a performative (or is it) kiss between two women—Ida (Buckley) is just a 1930s Chicago moll whooping it up with her gangster boyfriends (including John Magaro and Matthew Maher) and gal-pals when whoosh, in comes the spirit of Mary Shelley, stage left with a door-slam.
In the little we see of Ida on her own, she is no wallflower. But once Shelley the author and vengeful spirit sinks her fangs into her the temperature (and with it the accent-work) rises considerably. And before you know it, like all dames with mouths too big for their silken britches (pour one out for Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns) Ida’s but a bag of skin holding together broken bones at the bottom of a staircase only half a scene later. Good, because a good man needs a good corpse!
Turns out that on the other side of town, a shambling sack of body parts stitched together under a trenchcoat and over one hundred years old has just rolled into town. The monster made by a Swiss doctor all those many moons ago has come to see one Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening, having a blast at full ham), a prospective mad-doctor that Frank thinks might be willing to stitch him up a mate to ward off that beeyatch loneliness.
To her benefit, Euphronius does take a moment to weigh the moral and ethical quandaries at hand; her name might rhyme with the truly mad and deeply homosexual Dr. Pretorius of Whale’s film, but Euphronius at least pays lip service to what it means to force life and marriage upon an unwilling cadaver. Still the possibilities of science inevitably wins her over, and before you can say “Zzzap!” an entire top-floor lah-bor-atory of coils and spark-machines have been Frankensteined together, and a certain blond-headed moll’s limp-body’s been trussed to the table, wham bam.
Whale’s film saved The Bride’s birth for its final five minutes, which is a perfectly serviceable well of rage for Gyllenhaal to draw upon—The Bride of Frankenstein, a gay movie made by gay people, was never about The Bride, no matter how long a shadow Elsa Lanchester’s swan-hiss cast. She was a paper-doll that the boys dressed up in bandage couture to play-act straightness with, before pulling the whole damned windmill down around them as the innocent heterosexuals scampered off to their Hayes-Code-enforced safety.
Not so here—Buckley awakens with a roar, spitting black ink up from her insides as if her flesh itself is the very paper Shelley wrote upon. Stained and spattered, she’s her own force of nature—thankfully Frank (in a surprisingly sweet and tamped-down performance from Bale) is right off the bat infatuated with that life-force itself. She makes him a better man. Or a mannish adjacent thing, anyway. She gives him life. And with it, the picture.
Riffing on everything from Bonnie & Clyde to Babylon to Guy Maddin and Barbara Stanwyck (Buckley cited the greatest actress of Classic Hollywood as her main influence) to so very much more Mel Brooks than you could ever imagine, The Bride! from there shoots off into a million directions—it’s a black sparkler of sound and light, never so serious that you should ever get angry at its many many over-indulgences. If it never quite coheres into a logical directorial statement, who even cares—sometimes we just need to drag our dead asses off the floor and howl at the moon. To dance and shake and scream until our seams split. The good and the bad and the ugly of it is cubed meat twined together into the shambolic shape of a damned good time—truly, The Bride!’s an exquisite cinematic corpse if ever there was one.
