Franken-Watch: The Bride! (2026)

Watched:  07/01/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing;  First

Director:  Maggie Gyllenhaal

I was really looking forward to the release of The Bride! (2026).  

As many know, one of my favorite movies is The Bride of Frankenstein.  This ranking is followed immediately by Frankenstein, and I tend to think of them as a two-part movie as much as a pair of individual movies.  I still re-read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from time-to-time. In 2018, I celebrated the 200th anniversary of the book's publication by visiting a sort of display at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. 

The Bride! was released with what I'd consider a serious marketing push - a rarity these days.  And then the reviews hit and word was not good.  And then people I know saw it and were unenthused, and so I decided to wait for streaming.

I am sad to report that this was the right call.  

Here's what I think.  

Maggie Gyllenhaal not only directed The Bride!, she also wrote the movie and produced it.  Ie:  this was pure Gyllenhaal.  And maybe this movie should have been workshopped a lot more before it went before the lens.  Maybe try it on as a play or give it a polish with additional writers.  Workshop it.

We tend to get very precious about our thoughts and ideas, and this feels *extremely* precious about those things.  

The movie is less a story than a series of *ideas* that become increasingly less coherent over the movie's runtime.  It is a series of cinematically conceived sequences that are stitched together - Frankenstein'd, if you will - into a single movie.  

The film takes place in the 1930's, but a 1930's that's whatever Gyllenhaal wants it to be (and that is fine).  One part post-prohibition Chicago, one part Americana fantasy.  Mary Shelley exists as a narrator and possessing spirit.  The monster is played by Christian Bale, who is having a ball.  Seriously, he's doing good stuff here.  Our star is Jessie Buckley, who is very famous and I've never seen her in anything.  She's asked to swing wildly between personalities, and does great.  She and Tatiana Maslaney should hang out and compare notes.

What Gyllenhaal feels to be artful in its bombastic approach instead lands as awkward and a bit silly.  I should not openly cringe at lines like "here comes the motherfucking bride!" but, boy, did I.  And when you open on a clunker like that, it feels like you just tripped on your grand entrance.  

Put down as a list of things that happen, I don't think we have what's essentially a bad plot or a story that shouldn't have occurred.  There's just a sort of feeling that Gyllenhaal's reach has exceeded her grasp.  The message is clearly going to be "women live in a bad world and bringing them back from the dead to be someone's partner will illustrate that".  That is, after all, the message of The Bride of Frankenstein, where the idea is teased and then pulled out as essentially a punchline at the end of the movie (spoilers).  As it was the 1985 film The Bride.  And, most recently, DC Comics and now DC's animated series of Creature Commandos that features The Bride as a lead.  

All of which make the same points as this movie, but without a highlighter and Powerpoint deck of a series of events.

There's a love of cinema in the movie, especially of classic cinema.  Movies are pitched as how Frankenstein, who has been alive for over 100 years and is from Switzerland, experiences humanity.  And he has a taste for Fred Astaire-like musicals starring an actor played distractingly by Gyllenhaal's brother, Jake.

But, man, combining Frankenstein and "Puttin' on the Ritz" in a movie in 2026 seems like absolute madness - especially in such an uninspired and pointless scene.  I could not begin to fathom why Gyllenhaal (a) put this sequence in the film at all and (b) why she insisted on taking "Puttin' on the Ritz" back from Mel Brooks.  

I guess - stop reminding me of other movies that make me think about other things?  Why show me White Zombie if you don't want me to think about White Zombie and whether it was ever in 3D?  

Gyllenhaal has, for reasons that defy logic, named one main character Myrna Malloy - I assume after Myrna Loy, who was a huge star in the 1930's.  Which complicates the fact the big-boss sleazy villain is named "Lupino", which makes me think of Ida Lupino, who was not a comic book villain mobster and was, instead, a producer and director in an era where that practice for women was all but extinct.

Clearly Gyllenhaal had done some reading about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (nee Godwin) - which is a *fascinating* topic all unto itself.  The Godwin family is a gothic story all unto itself, and is a prismatic look into what was happening on the fringes of British society of the era - that not all views were in line with the rank and file.  

More importantly, Mary Shelley's mother, who died just after Mary was born, had been a dedicated women's rights advocate in the 18th century.  Her father was a politico himself - and an anarchist, and basically raised Mary as a feral intellectual.  One assumes Mary Shelley was just stewing in some interesting philosophy from her youngest days before she ran off with Percy Shelley when she was about 16.  Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the two men Shelley spent time with in Europe, were famed raconteurs and at least Byron was a bit of a rake.

All of which the movies assumes as some sort of pre-knowledge, and does nothing to highlight that for the audience.  The radical feminism of Mary Shelley's mother and father is imagined to have been imbued in their daughter, who - from beyond the grave, spins a story of how The Bride inspires women to become bad-asses - a storyline that goes nowhere.  Just as the storyline about the big mob boss goes absolutely nowhere and could be entirely cut from the film to probably greater effect.

The film has aspirations of the film itself as a sort of living thing.  Our characters appear on screens at the movies they attend, acting out their scenes like movie-heroes instead of as the wretches they are, breaking walls down.  

How meta is this story?  I do not know.  In real life, - Mary Shelley is an author who wrote a fictional book, but in this story Shelley seems to have written a book she knows is fictional  But then, our events take place in a world where Dr. Frankenstein created a man and people know about what he did.  

So did Mary write a non-fiction story?  Or is this story hers in the afterlife where she literally puts words in mouths?  Is she deathbed hallucinating?  I don't know.  I *think* we're to understand that the shadow Mary sitting in the dark (played by Jessie Buckley, who also plays The Bride) is real and speaking to us, the audience.  And maybe the story we're watching is not real - it's her latest narrative where she breaks in and her voice emerges through The Bride.  If true, it's Gyllenhaal speaking through Shelley speaking through The Bride.  

I suppose I don't need clarity exactly, but it would be nice to know and/ or care.

So the movie becomes about the possession of a young woman by Mary Shelley so that she can tell the story she dared not tell with her original novel - in which Victor Frankenstein refuses his creation a mate, and instead scatters her bits.  

I guess...  I just felt this movie was trying to be too many things.  It steps on its own ideas and messages.  It exists in a world that's a cartoon 1930's version of America, and relies on the audience knowing a little about a lot of things - but if you know too much, it starts to kind of fall apart.  

Even during the mad science scenes of the film's first third, it feels more like a college play production of someone doing something based on having seen stills of Frankenstein or Bride of Frankenstein rather than someone who replicated those sequences out of deep knowledge.  So it never feels *mad*.  It never feels like they truly went there - they just used some props that felt they were in the basic spirit of a Frankenstein movie.  And that's kind of how the whole movie feels.  Kinda/sorta there - and you can see what they're going for - but it feels like a Dunning Kruger version of those things.

If you're going to borrow from some of the most famous books, movies, etc...  maybe make sure you're saying something *new*, or at least not just repeating what has come before but far less eloquently and economically.  If you're going for the crown of Bride of Frankenstein, better not miss.  And this one ricocheted and hit the shooter in the butt.

For a movie I think felt free to let its freak flag fly but actually worked:  Poor Things.