“The Bride!” Leaves its Titular Character Voiceless
It seems like everyone in Hollywood is passing around the same copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Guillermo del Toro took on Frankenstein in 2025, and now it’s Maggie Gyllenhaal’s turn to bring the monster to life. She’s less interested in the man made from the body parts of other men and more compelled to give his counterpart a voice. The Bride! is an opportunity for this nameless, similarly re-animated woman to tell her story. At least that’s the film’s intention, but the movie struggles to uphold it, leaving her just as nameless as before.
Picture Chicago in the 1930s. Overrun by mobsters, dirty and gritty in the way cities used to be. It’s to this place that Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) has made his way. He’s read the books of Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) and believes she can give him a companion. He’s over one hundred years old and yearns for a chance at connection, both interpersonal and sexual. They dig up the body of Ida (Jessie Buckley), a woman who was mixed up with the mob when she was alive. Dr. Euphronius is successful and Ida is born from the dead as The Bride. She and Frank fall in love and find themselves on the run from the police.
Copyright: © 2026 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
The good of The Bride! is that Gyllenhaal has an impressive number of tricks up her sleeve. Her directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, also starring Buckley, was a more traditional drama film. The Bride! mixes gothic romance with a Bonnie & Clyde, gunslinger, love-on-the-run story. There are some truly sublime dance sequences that mesh contemporary lighting and movement with classic Hollywood glamour. Frank’s fascination with movie star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal) allows Gyllenhaal to play in this glamorous sandbox of yesteryear with the twinkling lights of old marquees glittering above violent crimes. It’s a part-mob film that feels as though the scales could tip at any moment and let it become a musical. That energy is infectious, and coupled with the madness of Buckley, there’s a lot to hold on to in The Bride!.
The bad of The Bride! is that its inherent framing device takes away the agency of Ida. The film opens with a title card that tells the audience Shelley wrote Frankenstein on a dare in 1818, and then we see the spiritual presence of Shelley, also played by Buckley. She tells us that she isn’t finished telling the story of Frankenstein’s monster, but to do so, she needs to possess the body of a woman. That just happens to be Ida. From the moment the audience meets Ida to the bitter end, we don’t see who she is as a character. Ida is immediately possessed by Shelley, and the character moves between the ghost of Shelley and herself. When she’s reanimated, she remembers nothing of her past. How do you give a character a voice if even she doesn’t know who she is?
Copyright: © 2026 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
One would think that would be the point of The Bride! To give voice to a woman who has spent decades without one in popular culture. Sure, she technically has a voice in this movie, unlike The Bride in 1938’s The Bride of Frankenstein, who has no lines in the entire film. But what does she do with that voice? Point out, with the help of the spirit of Mary Shelley, that women are subjected to violence on a regular basis? What about unpacking the violent act of having her body be dug out of a grave and electrocuted back to life at the request of a lonely man? The mere fact that Shelley’s spirit has taken control of Ida removes her sense of agency, leaving the audience with even less of an understanding of who Ida is and what she wants. Surely any of these topics would be something the film could address, and yet….
It’s not far to get from The Bride! to “Wuthering Heights.” Both are usually required reading in high school and both have been stripped of their intricate critiques of the society they were written in to make a more palatable, star-crossed-lovers storyline. The point of both of these books is the cycle of violence and how it must be broken if there is to be any hope for humanity. Instead, we’re getting heaving bosoms on the moor and kissing on the roofs of cars while on the run. These are not the stories Brontë and Shelley intended, but both could have been. While Buckley proves once again that she’s a once-in-a-generation performer, her Bride can’t be heard over the roar of the world around her. In The Bride!, there’s enough interesting scaffolding to believe that another version of this movie exists, and that it could capture the distinct feminine rage of feeling voiceless.
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