The Bride!: A Feminist Frankenstein That Plays Like a Lost Remnant of Woke Culture
A cinematic time capsule from before the vibe shift.
The most impressive thing about The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal's feminist revamp of The Bride of Frankenstein, is how thoroughly ill-conceived it is. This movie fails at everything.
There is not a single scene, line reading, or fleeting moment that lands. Every single actor is miscast. Every single idea is underdeveloped. Every single moment of intended catharsis is maximally cringe. It is a total and complete misfire, in which every creative choice is a bad one. I have not one good word to say about it. It's the Kristi Noem of feminist monster fantasias.
The story begins in a Prohibition-era speakeasy, as a young woman Ida (Jessie Buckley) begins to speak out against a grubby local gangster. For her sins, she is killed and buried. And then, shortly afterward, she's dug up and brought back to life. A hundred years after his creation, you see, Frankenstein's monster—he goes by Frank—is still alive. And he's lonely. So Frank (played by Christian Bale) visits the Chicago office of a Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), a mad scientist who brings Ida back to life in classic monster movie fashion, with fried white hair and a streak of painterly black running across her face.
Ida and Frank begin traveling the country, exploring feminist concepts while occasionally killing people. There's a more complex plot involving a movie star played by Jake Gyllenhaal and the aforementioned gangster at the speakeasy, but it's so muddled it hardly matters. None of it holds together; I've seen wars in Iran that make more sense than this movie.
On their trail are a pair of detectives, Jake Wiles and Myrna Mallow, played by Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz. Technically, Myrna is Jake's assistant. The gag is that she's the one doing all the real detective work, but, see, she's a woman, so everyone disrespects her. This motif is handled in the crudest and most simplistic possible way, as nearly every scene follows the same pattern: Jake and Myrna arrive at a crime scene. The local male police officers behave rudely. Eventually, Myrna finds an important clue.
As Ida and Frank continue their Bonnie and Clyde-like crime spree, they spark a national feminist revolution, in which women begin rebelling against the patriarchy in various nonsensical ways, mostly by shouting things in the streets. This is barely set up, gets about 90 seconds of screen time, and then is largely dropped from the plot after a brief exchange between Jake and Myrna, in which Jake earnestly gushes: "Imagine if they got this excited over a lady astronaut or a lady brain surgeon." Or, Myrna shoots back, "a lady detective," I think this is supposed to be a provocative zinger. But like everything in the film, it lands with a groan.
Speaking of groaning, Bale spends most of the movie grunting and growling, trying to find some sort of emotional throughline for his character. But the script offers him nothing except a confused obsession with a film star. Buckley, somehow, is even worse, stuck pointing guns and babbling nonsense feminist koans while the camera whoops and whirls around her, trying to drum up some sort of manic energy. If anything, it's not quirky or audacious enough: The Bride! is such a creative misfire that it even fails as camp.
Developed in 2023 and early 2024, The Bride! was passed between studios that reportedly disagreed with writer-director Gyllenhaal about budget and creative direction. Looking at the disastrous final product, it's hard not to come down on the side of executives who had creative disagreements. And no amount of money should have been spent on this mess.
More than anything else, The Bride! feels like the lost remnants of a pre-vibe shift culture, the last vestige of a fully woke world. There are explicit references to riot grrrl culture, and the film's climax literally involves Ida repeatedly shouting "me too!" at no one in particular.
It would be too easy to describe this as a stitched-together monster of a movie, but at least Frankenstein's monster had something resembling life.
