From Maggie Gyllenhaal (Academy Award-nominated writer/director of The Lost Daughter) and starring Academy Award nominee Jessie Buckley and Academy Award winner Christian Bale comes THE BRIDE! A bold, iconoclastic take on one of the world’s most compelling stories.
A lonely Frankenstein (Bale) travels to 1930s Chicago to ask groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (five-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening) to create a companion for him. The two revive a murdered young woman and The Bride (Buckley) is born. What ensues is beyond what either of them imagined: Murder! Possession! A wild and radical cultural movement! And outlaw lovers in a wild and combustible romance!
What We Thought:
I didn’t like The Bride! I thought so little of it I wasn’t even going to write a review for it. In fact I walked out thinking that even though we were only 62 days into the year when I saw it, it could very well end up being the worst movie of 2026 that I see.
The biggest problem with the film is that it starts out like it wants to say something and by the end, it either doesn’t have something to say or I was so bored with it that the message didn’t land. It will be a movie that the average movie goer hates and Film Twitter/film critics will claim to love and defend and tell you that you didn’t understand it. It’s going to lose money regardless.
It also doesn’t make a lick of sense. In the movie Christian Bale plays Frankenstein’s Monster who’s been around for decades at this point. Ok I can buy into that. Vampires live for centuries so other famous monsters can be around for a while too. How it doesn’t make sense is that Mary Shelley is the opening narrator who seems to possess Jessie Buckley’s character who will become The Bride. How can a real life writer and her literary creation exist in the same universe? Why did Buckley’s character need to be possessed by Shelley in the first place? Her death could have been from any type of accident that leads to her being reborn. The Shelley angle adds nothing to Buckley’s performance other than her appearing to be bipolar or having Tourette’s especially as the character’s backstory is revealed to be much deeper than expected.
The film also has no idea what it wants to be. Is it a Creature Feature? A feminist anti-hero story in the tone of Joker? A buddy road trip movie? A Bonnie & Clyde ripoff? A movie writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal put together just to work with her brother, husband, friends and people she wanted to work with?
The Bride! will be one of the few Christian Bale films I never watch again. The cast is fine and it has some cool visuals, but as a film it’s not good. The narrative is all over the map and having just cool aesthetics and fine performances don’t make a movie worth watching to me. I left the screening mad I even went and that’s never a good reaction to a movie.
The Nerds Templar 