THE BRIDE (2026)

Studio:   Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Writer:   Maggie Gyllenhaal
Producer: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Talia Kleinhendler, Osnat Handelsman Keren
Stars:    Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Jeannie Berlin, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penelope Cruz

Review Score:

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Summary:

Shocking acts stemming from an unusual romance between Frankenstein’s Monster and a resurrected woman spark a cultural rebellion centered in 1930s Chicago.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

While working as an undercover informant in a case against notorious mob boss Vito Lupino, free-spirited Ida becomes inexplicably possessed by the ghost of author Mary Shelley during a lavish dinner party in 1936 Chicago. Already inebriated and tiring of men behaving boorishly toward her, Ida shocks guests by loudly calling out Lupino for his crimes. Two gangsters, Clyde and Jake, pull Ida into a stairwell where they repeatedly slap Ida in an attempt to tame her. When Clyde comes toward her, Ida falls down a staircase to a bone-breaking death.

Having wandered the world for over 100 years, Frankenstein’s Monster, who soon comes to be known by the nickname “Frank,” comes to Chicago to ask Dr. Cornelia Euphronious, a renowned scientist in the field of reinvigoration, to cure his terminal loneliness my making a monstrous mate for him. Once he finally persuades her, Frank and Cornelia dig up Ida’s body and bring Ida back to life. With no memory of who she was or what happened prior to her death, Cornelia and Frank convince Ida she is Frank’s Bride. Frank becomes increasingly enamored with his Bride, whom he later renames Penelope Rogers, the more he witnesses her brash and rebellious behavior.

Frank takes Penelope to a movie theater to show her “The Dubious Detective,” his favorite film starring his idol Ronnie Reed. After the movie, the two of them go to a dance club.

While dancing, two men aggressively manhandle Penelope as she again shouts about Vito Lupino. Frank pulls Penelope outside. The two men follow them. When the men attempt to assault Penelope, Frank violently kills them both. Someone snaps photographs of the monstrous couple as they flee the scene.

Worried that his grotesqueness will only cause her more trouble, Frank proposes that he and Penelope go separate ways. Unable to recall where she lives, Penelope insists on accompanying Frank.

Penelope and Frank sneak out of town as stowaways aboard a train. Penelope’s loud singing attracts a cop’s attention in Indiana. With the cop startled by Frank’s appearance, Penelope uses the moment to lunge at him. The cop falls out of the train car and snaps his neck on the tracks, upsetting Penelope.

Chicago detective Jake Wiles and his intuitive secretary Myrna Malloy investigate the murders of the men outside the dance club. Their investigation takes them to the dead train cop in Indiana, where Myrna recovers a keepsake newspaper clipping about Ronnie Reed that Frank dropped. News soon travels to Frank and Penelope that there is a nationwide manhunt for them as they have been labeled “killer monsters.”

Now aware of his obsession with actor/dancer Ronnie Reed, Jake and Myrna stake out a movie theater in New York showing “The Dubious Detective.” Wanting to see something different, Penelope takes Frank across the street to a 3-D showing of “White Zombie” instead. There, Penelope steps in when she sees a man becoming aggressive with his resistant date. Recognizing Penelope and Frank from the news, the man alerts the audience to their presence, inciting a panicked mob that chases Frank and Penelope outside. Seeing the commotion, Jake and Myrna follow.

Frank and Penelope hide in an elegant ballroom hosting a lavish celebration. Frank is surprised to see Ronnie Reed in attendance. Frank gives Ronnie gushing praise as he credits the actor’s work for Frank’s survival, but Ronnie only responds with a condescending comment.

Frank and Penelope suddenly start dancing. Other attendees join in, but they are interrupted by the arrival of numerous cops. Recognizing each other, Jake and Penelope lock eyes. When police officers take Frank into custody, Penelope recovers a gun and takes Ronnie Reed hostage to negotiate for Frank’s release.

Penelope starts shouting about Vito Lupino being a misogynist murderer who pays off authorities to operate freely. She additionally calls out other men in attendance for their crimes against women. Speaking for the dead, Penelope inspires other women with the rallying cry, “Brain Attack!”

Penelope instinctively shoots a cop who approaches her. Frank creates a commotion that allows the two of them to escape outside. Jake finds Frank and Penelope kissing in the street, but he allows them to go free.

Frank and Penelope return to their hideout where they finally have sex. The couple continues having sex and growing closer together as they go back on the run. Along the way, Frank gets the name Penelope tattooed across his chest.

Dr. Cornelia Euphronious’s maid Greta relays the news that Penelope’s actions in Manhattan ignited a cultural revolution. Multiple women become vigilantes while committing copycat crimes and emulating Penelope’s image through tattoos that reflect her distinct look.

Vito Lupino meets with gangsters Clyde and James regarding Penelope invoking his name prior to her highly publicized bloodbath. Lupino immediately shoots James when he laughs that Penelope already died. With a veiled threat against his family, Lupino tasks Clyde with cutting out Penelope’s tongue.

Myrna Malloy connects that every city where Frank and Penelope have been seen is a location from a Ronnie Reed movie. Myrna determines Frank and Penelope will go to Niagara Falls next.

Penelope asks Frank what their life together was like before her resurrection. Frank lies by telling a fanciful story about their courtship and wedding.

Frank and Penelope are pulled over by Officer Goodman. Knowing he can’t afford to be recognized, Frank covers his face and pretends to sleep while Penelope is pulled out of the car. Goodman tells lewd jokes while groping Penelope under the guise of performing a pat down. Frank suddenly shoots Goodman as well as his partner sitting in a nearby patrol car. Penelope bites out Goodman’s tongue before fleeing into the woods with Frank.

Seeing herself as revolting due to the gruesome acts she has committed, Penelope attracts Jake Wiles’s attention in Niagara Falls. Apologizing for his role in her prior life, Jake identifies Penelope as Ida while offering to help her. Myrna interrupts. Frank and Jake each take a bullet in an exchange of gunfire between the two sides. Frank and Penelope get away.

Frank jealously demands to know more about Jake and his apparent relationship with Penelope. Penelope contends she doesn’t remember who Jake is.

With Myrna having already noticed Jake and Penelope exchanging stares in New York, Jake explains to his partner that Ida was working as an escort to bankers and mobsters as part of an undercover sting to incriminate Vito Lupino. When the case was closed early, Ida insisted on doing anything she could to reopen it. Jake took advantage of the situation by sleeping with Ida, yet he did nothing to reopen the Lupino investigation. Jake tells Myrna he plans to resign and name Myrna as his replacement. Lupino’s agent Clyde overhears the whole exchange.

A tip leads Myrna, and Clyde, to a drive-in theater showing the Ronnie Reed movie “Heartbreak Holiday,” where Penelope took Frank for comfort after his breathing became irregular. Myrna eavesdrops as Frank admits to Penelope that he lied about having a life together before her resurrection, and he tells her the truth behind how Cornelia created her. Although she is upset, Penelope insists on being renamed “The Bride.” However, the Bride rejects Frank’s new marriage proposal as she declares she isn’t anyone’s bride.

Clyde suddenly shoots Frank. The Bride speeds away from police with Frank bleeding to death in their car’s backseat.

The Bride rushes Frank back to Cornelia in Chicago. Holding the doctor at gunpoint, the Bride makes an emotional plea for Cornelia to save Frank. Cornelia warns the Bride by recounting a story of how experiments performed on her own husband resulted in changing him to such an unrecognizable state that he had to be euthanized.

From the fire escape, Clyde shoots the Bride, which kickstarts a flurry of additional gunfire from cops assembled at the scene. The Bride is shot repeatedly until Myrna, who had followed the Bride to Chicago, commands everyone to stop. Although the police initially dismiss her, Myrna presents Jake’s badge to get everyone to leave the room. Myrna also leaves after implying she will give Cornelia as much time as the doctor needs to resurrect Frank and the Bride. Clyde is arrested.

Cornelia and her servant Greta work through the night to bring Frank and the Bride back to life. As their first act upon resurrecting, Frank and the Bride clasp their hands together.

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Review:

Timing matters when writing, and especially when reading, a movie review. Savvier film fans already know to add a grain of salt whenever heaps of hype come out of a festival, where overzealous lemmings hypnotized by electric atmospheres froth at the mouth to trumpet effusive acclaim when what they really want to do is brag about being the first bandwagoner on the train. Add another grain whenever hyperbolic gushing follows a glitzy Hollywood premiere, where influencers might be the ones being influenced by a big studio’s wining, dining, and swag bags of exclusive items.

Even after a movie releases to the general public, it remains important to consider when a review’s words were put down on the page. Take writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride,” or “The Bride!” with an exclamation point for those who prefer to hear the title screaming. Going only off of what was being said when the film first hit theaters in March of 2026, someone might be led to believe “The Bride” was the best thing since sliced bread. One critic called it “your new favorite movie,” adding that there was “no bad news” to report with his 90/100 score. Someone else hailed the film as “an explosive representation of social disruption.” Others collectively mused it wasn’t too early to talk about awards, praising performances and Gyllenhaal’s quirky creativity for forcing fresh air into familiar concepts through subversive artistry.

Fast forward two months to “The Bride” dropping on Blu-ray after already being available to rent digitally at home. Social media circles devoted to horror had long since changed topics. Mainstream outlets had newer media darlings to crow about. In under eight weeks, “The Bride” went from a ballyhooed blockbuster you couldn’t miss if you wanted to be in on the conversation everyone was supposed to be having, to a quickly eclipsed title no longer chirping on the entertainment radar.

Were early adopters knowingly or unknowingly contributing to an exaggerated narrative inflating the film’s importance? Were ordinary audiences less enthusiastic because they simply didn’t see the bigger picture Maggie Gyllenhaal was painting with a brash brush of timely commentary cleverly coloring her original take on the tragic tale of a monster and his mate? As is usually the case, an objective perspective lies somewhere between two subjective POVs, and individuals will lean toward one or the other depending on how much, or how little, they get out of the movie.

“The Bride” is an exercise in extremes in ways other than inspiring those two opposing opinions. Gyllenhaal alternates her movie’s mood between two extremes as well, with one being an inclination to overexpose obvious themes in bright neon floodlights, or else hiding intentions deep in cryptic confusion often brought on by overwrought dialogue and sensationalized character moments whose purposes aren’t even close to clear.

“The Bride” can be seen as a pseudo-legacy sequel the same way David Gordon Green’s 2018 “Halloween” directly follows John Carpenter’s 1978 original. While the movie presents itself as a sequel to Mary Shelley’s novel, someone could alternatively presume “The Bride” takes place within the same world as the 1931 “Frankenstein” starring Boris Karloff, but with all of its sequels ignored.

Since the end of that novel/film, Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale), who gets the nickname “Frank” here, has wandered the world in search of a solution to a century of loneliness. Frank’s travels lead him to Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), a scientist experienced in rejuvenation, in 1936 Chicago. There, Franks convinces Cornelia to make him a companion out of Ida (Jessie Buckley), a spunky socialite with Mae West’s wit and Clara Bow’s style. Ida recently died a bone-breaking death after publicly shaming a notorious mobster. Even resurrected as a bit of a monster herself, she’s as rebelliously independent as ever, and Frank couldn’t be more smitten with someone so fearless, fearsome, and free-spirited.

What comes next is a cross-country courtship that’s less of a love affair and more of a romantic reawakening for Ida as she comes to terms with who she was, who she is now, and what her involvement with Frank might mean for her future. Along the way, crimes are committed when panicked mobs and policemen react irrationally at the sight of Frank and his bizarre Bride together, attracting the attention of a dogged detective (Peter Sarsgaard) and his intuitive partner Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz) in the most on-the-nose “Thin Man” reference ever. Not to mention the crime boss whose gangsters already killed her once wants to see the Bride murdered again after she inspires a wave of vigilantism against misogynist men like him.

Subtle, “The Bride” is not. There’s no mistaking the meaning behind scenes such as a police officer, notably named “Goodman,” pulling the Bride out of a car to sneer lewd jokes in her ear while using his unnecessary pat down as an opportunity to slip aggressive hands up her skirt. Nor is the context unclear in an early scene where a man at a lavish dinner party not only coerces a resistant Ida into slurping an oyster, but compels her to say “please” before shoving the offensive object into her capitulating mouth.

Far more ambiguous in intent than several scenes of attempted assault are the word salads Ida/The Bride regularly tosses with the tongs of an odd accent and odder script. Muttered monologues swell with lines like, “a paucity, a poverty, crumbs from a stifled mind. And they are gobbled, gulped, scoffed, wolfed.” Sometimes patter plays a part, like when the Bride meets Frank with the words, “Slow down, mate. Shipmate. Helpmate. Stalemate. Amalgamate. Imitate. Decimate. Transubstantiate. Sublimate. Consummate. Checkmate,” pausing only to belch out a burp in between.

A peculiar proclivity for dialogue that may or may not mean anything metaphorically or literally can be partially attributed to Ida being inexplicably possessed by the ghost of Mary Shelley. Shelley explains through the fourth wall in a black-and-white prologue that something is cracking in the afterlife, and the only way to get a certain story out of her head is to become a second mind inside Ida. As Shelley puts it, “Here comes the mother*cking Bride,” forecasting a devastating tsunami of defiance that may or may not have a definitive destination.

Cloudy eyes can still see how “The Bride” bangs a loud drum aimed right between the ears of patriarchal power. It’s no coincidence that the Bride is created as a sex object for Frank, yet all attempts to tame her both before and after her resurrection only fuel the grassroots revolution she leads against oppressive gender norms. It’s also no accident that the women she inspires through her daring actions are as intelligent and as assertive as Myrna, who is used to being ignored to the point of invisibility when her male partner is a preferred point of contact. Once again though, what “The Bride” wants to say with a Broadway dance number where Frank and his Bride lead a spontaneous chorus line as a response to an insult, seems very much open to nonplussed interpretation.

“The Bride” is what an experimental film looks like when it’s crafted by longtime Hollywood professionals deciding to do something out of the box without a complete blueprint. There’s an underlying hint of freshmen awkwardly fumbling to film stream-of-consciousness ideas, but the money and talent mean the movie gets a vibrant veneer of highly stylized production design. Because of the names involved, cast and crew have the freedom to take as many risks as they want. Maggie Gyllenhaal and company know that, and they take full advantage of the opportunity to test creative boundaries. Quantifiable results of their experiment, on the other hand, are a separate matter, and one that comes with a mystery regarding how much of a resonant rallying cry “The Bride” really turns out to be in the end.

Review Score: 55

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