The Bride! (2026) Review: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Wildly Ambitious Frankenstein Reimagining

Star Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

The Bride!

Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

Written by Maggie Gyllenhaal

Starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, and Annette Bening

Released March 6th, 2026

A Bold, Weird Homage to Classic Monster Cinema

The Bride! is a wildly audacious spectacle—a balls-to-the-wall adventure in experimental storytelling and an homage to the past that reminds us how brilliantly weird movies once were.

If you’ve never seen Bride of Frankenstein, that film was itself a wild experiment. It took the then recent blockbuster Frankenstein and used it as a jumping-off point for cinematic experimentation that still resonates today.

The Bride! exists in that same experimental vein.

That I don’t feel the film reaches its full potential is true—but so is my admiration for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s visionary risk-taking. Gyllenhaal fearlessly plumbs the depths of her artistic ideas and comes up with striking visuals and intriguing concepts. The film needed only to cohere more fully as a story for me to sit here and tell you I loved it.

A Gangster Story Possessed by Mary Shelley

The film centers on Ida, a Chicago good-time gal of the 1930s who has recently emerged from an alcoholic haze with the chilling realization that she and the women she considers friends are all in grave danger.

A local gangster has begun purging women he suspects of talking to the police. His calling card is grotesque: cutting out the tongues of women he believes are informing and using them as a warning to everyone else.

Ida is convinced she may be next.

But while she’s navigating life as a gangster’s girl—drinking and dancing in smoky underworld bars—something happens that may expose her as having spoken to the cops.

Then the film takes a bizarre and brilliant turn.

Ida’s consciousness is invaded by the spirit of Mary Shelley, who intends to use Ida as a vessel to tell the story she never got to tell while she was alive.

Speaking like a strange hybrid of a drunken Bette Davis and a posh English aristocrat, Jessie Buckley plays Shelley in a series of cutaways where the mad, cackling author threatens us with a good time. She promises a ribald tale of murder, resurrection, sex, and crime—the kind of story no one would have allowed her to write in her lifetime.

Resurrection in Depression-Era Chicago

Before Mary can begin weaving her tale, Ida is murdered by her gangster boyfriend, played by John Magaro, who throws her down a flight of stairs while trying to stop her from confessing dangerous secrets about his boss.

Her death briefly halts Mary’s story—but fate intervenes.

Frank—Frankenstein’s monster, played by Christian Bale—arrives in Chicago in dire shape. After wandering the Earth miserable and alone, he seeks out a new scientist capable of continuing the experiments begun by Dr. Frankenstein.

He finds one in Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), a doctor researching the resurrection of the dead.

Frank offers himself as the key to unlocking her research—on one condition.

She must create for him a mate.

A bride.

The pair stumble upon Ida’s freshly dug grave, the dirt still brown from burial. Retrieving her broken body, they begin the process of resurrecting her. Ida returns to life with no memory of who she once was. After some coaxing, she’s convinced Frank is her husband or lover and that they might build a life together.

Ida becomes Penelope—The Bride.

Jessie Buckley’s Mary Shelley Steals the Show

But the wild card in all of this is Mary.

She may not know who Ida used to be, but she remembers exactly who she is—and with Ida resurrected, she can continue telling the story unfolding before us.

It’s a bold storytelling device that never receives a full explanation. Yet it’s so wonderfully odd that I didn’t care about the mechanics. I simply wanted more time with the wildly charismatic Mary Shelley imagined by Jessie Buckley and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

The Surprising Parallel to Wrestling’s “Timeless Toni Storm”

Oddly enough, the closest modern comparison I can make to Buckley’s performance comes from professional wrestling.

In All Elite Wrestling, wrestler Toni Storm currently portrays the character Timeless Toni Storm. After a fictional head injury, the formerly punk-styled wrestler became convinced she was actually a glamorous 1930s movie star.

She began speaking in a theatrical accent reminiscent of classic Hollywood actresses.

In one of the biggest women’s wrestling storylines in recent memory, Storm essentially played out the plot of All About Eve inside a wrestling ring.

The storyline culminated in 2025 with one of the most brutal and memorable women’s matches I’ve ever seen—a blood-soaked war rarely allowed in televised wrestling.

Storm’s persona is wildly ribald and theatrical, and you can’t take your eyes off her.

And every time Jessie Buckley appears as Mary Shelley in The Bride!, I hear echoes of that same spirit. The voice. The theatricality. The flamboyant erotic danger.

I’m not suggesting Buckley was influenced by Toni Storm—she may not even know the character exists—but both performances clearly draw from the same well of influence: outsized Hollywood icons like Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich.

Sadly, these references may be lost on modern audiences. Without that context, Buckley’s performance might seem chaotic. With it, her performance becomes something far more interesting: a loving, outrageous revival of vintage Hollywood glamour.

Where the Story Begins to Struggle

I wish The Bride! carried more of the anarchic excitement found in Mary Shelley’s scenes.

Instead, the film ultimately asks us to sympathize with Ida and Frank as lost souls wandering through a corrupt world, simply trying to survive life after death.

The movie carefully chooses the targets of their crimes so we don’t judge them too harshly. Rather than becoming a monstrous version of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, they remain conflicted and introspective figures pushed toward violence rather than seeking it.

That restraint becomes the film’s biggest problem.

The world of The Bride! is at its most entertaining when it leans into excess. Every time the film slows down to contemplate guilt or moral hesitation, it feels like the movie is tripping over its own wild spirit.

Frank himself is portrayed as a weary, melancholy giant—more resigned than angry. He dreams of movie stardom, imagining a glamorous life represented by a fictional screen idol played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

The film strives for poignance, but that gentler tone clashes with the outrageous, theatrical energy surrounding it.

Final Thoughts

There is nothing here that feels truly bad.

I simply wish The Bride! had committed fully to one direction: either the tragic poignance of Frank and Ida’s existence or the cackling insanity of Mary Shelley’s narrative takeover.

Instead, the film splits the difference.

That compromise drags down much of what I love about the movie—the ambition, the grimy steampunk-adjacent aesthetic, the gothic bleakness fused with theatrical, almost campy energy.

The Bride! looks and feels like a movie that desperately wants to run wild toward glorious, batshit insanity.

But it keeps stopping itself.

And that hesitation ultimately keeps this bold experiment from becoming the classic it so clearly wants to be.