Here comes the Motherf*ing Bride!
Messy curls, a black bridal veil and an orange dress. She doesn’t remember anything from before. She only knows what she likes, what she doesn’t like and that an odd voice keeps talking to her. When someone asks her not to do something she simply responds with a:
“I would prefer not to.”
A year after Guillermo del Toro’s exploration of Shelleys ‘Frankenstein’ we dive into Maggie Gyllenhaal’s take on another character inspired by the world of Frankenstein’s Monster: ‘The Bride.’
The story reimagines the legacy of ‘Frankenstein’ and its famous bride, first brought to screen in 1935. Back then she was there, but she wasn’t allowed to speak. This film thinks about what she could be saying if she were given a voice. Stripped of her past and forced into a new existence, she must decide what parts of herself she will accept and what parts she will refuse.
A dark voice in the beginning. Close-Ups of Jessie Buckley as no other than Mary Shelley talking to the audience.
“Knock, knock. Who’s there? It’s me, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. I know everyone loves it, but darlings, that wasn’t the half of it. What I wanted to write, what I needed to say, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think it. Then I got a cancer of the brain and I couldn’t write at all, so I died. Immediately I woke to find myself here, wherever the fuck here is. And here I’ve stayed for centuries, trying to find some way of getting this tumor, this dream, this story out of my head. Darlings, something is cracking. The words are beginning to come. Is it a ghost story? A horror story? Or most frightening of all, a love story?”
(The Bride, 2026)
This is a film that fully commits to its vision, even when that vision veers into the surreal, the theatrical, or the downright bizarre.
Chicago. 1940s. Lonely “Frank” (Christian Bale) travels all the way to meet the mad scientist Euphronius (played by Annette Bening) to help him create a companion, since eternity becomes lonely after a while. What both of them do not expect is the energy and power ‘The Bride’ brings to both of their lives.
Jessie Buckley plays Mary Shelley, Ida (The Brides’ former ‘form’) and The Bride. She carries the film with an astonishing presence and somehow manages to make every version of the character feel fully realized and three dimensional. Her Shelley laughter is something I might still hear for a really long time.
The films motifs revolve around creation, identity, and authorship which is all framed by the choice of having the woman who first imagined Frankenstein’s world as the fictional narrator of the story.
Maggie Gyllenhaal weaves in countless film references and moments that feel like love letters to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Very prominent is its visual homage to Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ (1927).
Visually and stylistically, the film is wildly inventive. It moves between grotesque horror, a romantic fantasy and an old Hollywood musical. Dancing becomes a recurring language of freedom and is a stylistic Christian Bale’s “Frank”enstein brings to the film with joy.
Bale manages to turn “Frank” into a character I truly adored until he also showed signs of possessiveness towards ‘The Bride’, beginning by constantly lying to her leading into him doubting her loyalty. There are glimpses before though, where we truly get a duo we didn’t think we needed. Their connection raises a central question the film never answers definitively: is this truly a love story? Or are we all watching a toxic relationship unfold?
The film constantly questions the idea of romance, autonomy, and companionship. The Bride loses control of her narrative and takes it back again and again. Men exist largely at the edges of the story, since this is fundamentally about the Bride deciding who she wants to be.
In many ways, the film feels like a celebration of female rage and female autonomy. She motivates other female characters to step up and speak.
As much as it works, at times, though, the film’s ambition works against it. With so many ideas, references, musical sequences, detective subplots, some storylines do feel a little underdeveloped.
Still, even when it stumbles, “The Bride” remains a fun experience. It is playful, avant-garde, and unapologetically strange. A film that invites the audience to question identity, autonomy, and the roles we are asked to play.
Overall Rating
by Rue Guercan