4 min readMar 6, 2026 07:37 PM IST
The Bride! movie review: “I’m revolting,” says Ida/Penny/The Bride/Mary Shelley in The Bride!. “Oh, no!” exclaims Frank/Frankenstein. “Relax,” says she, or means it anyway. “I am revolting as in mutiny.”
Just in case you didn’t get it – and there is little chance of that. From exposition of scientific terms regarding how dead persons are brought alive again, as in Frankenstein and Ida, to exposition on how this is actually a feminist treatise, in the garb of a horror/romance, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! doesn’t believe in leaving anything unsaid.
So it is that Ida (Buckley) at a crucial juncture says “Me Too” once and, then, once more. So it is that Dr Euphronius (Bening) underlines that she must keep her first name hidden to get published. So it is that Frank (Bale) revels in Ida’s refusal to be anybody’s wife. And so it is that the detective who cracks the case, Mallow (Cruz), outwits the others because nobody notices the woman officer in the room.
Not that there is inherently an issue with reimagining the minor bride in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein as “the real story” that she wanted to tell. Nor is it a surprise that she never got around to it, for a monstrous woman has few takers – whether then, or now, 200 years later.
But, Gyllenhaal, who has also written the script for the film, wants her Ida to be a stand-in for too much. Possessed by Mary Shelley’s ghost, she is a woman from whom repressed vocabulary comes pouring out, and who is seeking to “find my name”. Ida is about women “silenced” and women “obliterated”, women harassed and women exploited. She is also about all the 99% who are “angry” with the 1% who have bought their silence. And finally, she is Bonnie to Frank’s Clyde, besides being Romeo to his Juliet.
That The Bride! and the Bride don’t wilt under these expectations is the powerhouse performance by Buckley, who is game to every mercurial emotion demanded of her role. She shifts from possessed and manic, to sad and confused in the blink of an eye, the splat of dark ink stuck to the side of her black painted lips barely a distraction at these moments.
Bale has less to do, but the tremendous actor that he is, evokes surprising sympathy and gentleness in his role of the little-understood Frankenstein. This story belongs to The Bride, and Bale knows just how to help Buckley shine.
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Gyllenhaal’s husband Sarsgaard (as Mallow’s boss Wiles) and her brother Jake (as movie star Reed) are really unnecessary to the story, as is a mob angle, but they help string along some of the many themes that the writer-director is exploring.
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That there are many flashes of brilliance here is evident from the very first scene, where Shelley’s ghost first spots Ida, then an escort for the mob crowd – “good, quiet but fractured inside” – as the ideal body for her to inhabit. Buckley owns that scene, which is what it is, without any grand ambitions.
The Bride! too works the best when it is not trying too hard.
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The Bride! movie director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
The Bride! movie cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Penelope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard, Jake Gyllenhaal
The Bride! movie director: 2 stars
