In 1818, Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) penned “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” a story of a reanimated corpse she conceived of while spending a summer forced indoors on the banks of Lake Geneva in the Swiss Alps. In 1936, Chicago, Ida (also Jessie Buckley) falls out of favor with the mob that runs the city and likewise falls to her death. Elsewhere in the city, Frank (Christian Bale), a reanimated corpse and medical wonder that has fled persecution faced back home in Europe, enlists Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening) to make him a bride so that he will not spend his earthly eternity alone. After some convincing, Dr. Euphronious agrees, and the two make for the cemetery where they dig up the freshest grave they can find; Ida’s.

Maggie Gyllenhaal writes and directs The Bride!, a thematic adaptation of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and filtered through a modern lens. After a fraught production that resulted in multiple delays – and possibly trying to walk the line of riding the wave from Buckley’s awards success with Hamnet (2025) while trying to make space between this and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) – the 126-minute film was eventually released wide by Warner Brothers on over 3,300 domestic screens including an IMAX engagement. The studio, despite their fumbling of a long standing relationship with Christopher Nolan in 2020, and more recently with David Zaslav selling off the historic company for his own financial gain while essentially signing off on the pink slips pf thousands of Hollywood workers, has continued to be a champion for artists, awarding Gyllenhaal her largest budget to date for her post #MeToo telling of the bride of Frankenstein, released across the same frame as the similarly bold swing-and-a-miss Mickey 17 (2025) from Bong Joon-ho, hot off of his historic Oscar-winning sweep with Parasite (2019).

This film hinges on Buckley’s performance, one that asks her to play no less than three personalities all at odds with each other inside of the same reanimated body. Acting as Ida’s voice of conscience is Mary Shelley herself, shot in black and white against a dark background by cinematographer Lawrence Sher. Buckley embodies the Regency-era writer with a slight mania of a woman so intellectually and emotionally ahead of her time that it certainly must have driven her crazy. That Gyllenhaal then chooses to set the film in the mid 1930s, a mere 17 years after the women’s suffrage movement secured their constitutional right to vote, seems to be trying to talk back to Shelley, in her nondescript corner and a century removed from the action of the film, but it could have been a stronger message had the film been set during the ratification process. Sure, that would have set the film in the midst of prohibition, but the alcohol could have still flown freely at the mob operated speak easies, and the riot/walkout that occurs somewhere in the middle of the film as news of Ida’s exploits inspires a generation of women to stand up for their independence would feel a lot more as part of the world of the film and part of the narrative instead of the modern finger pointing lecture that it comes off as in the film as presented. It is a simple shift that would have added a bit more weight and a lot more framework around what exactly it is Gyllenhaal is trying to say here because, as presented, the film is both stylistically and thematically unwieldy.

While her feminist themes do get muddied through their presentation, one thing that remains clear is that The Bride! is an unabashed love letter to cinema. Not without its share of shots looking up at the projection booth with the light of the bulb illuminating our heroes from behind as if it is a halo, Gyllenhaal brings this reverence to the screen out of the cinema and into the streets of America as Frank and Ida are on the run, conjuring up memories of Bonnie and Clyde’s time on the lam. Frank, here, dressed by Sandy Powell and with makeup designed by Nicki Ledermann, is looking much more traditional and Karloff-esque, stitched and bolted together in stark contrast to Jacob Elordi’s more Promethean depiction of the character, still fresh in the audience’s mind from only months prior. Beyond that, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), a Gene Kelly-esque performer, looms large over the film with Frank, having served once as an extra on one of his films, is almost guaranteed to buy a ticket to whichever film of his is playing in the town he and Ida are hiding out in at the time. It is a pattern that eventually leads to their downfall as detectives Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz) and Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard), gumshoes that pay a sloppy yet recognizable homage to their Noir archetypes, eventually track the duo down at a drive-in theatre near Niagara Falls for a penultimate shootout. Sher also seems to shoot the detective work with a different lighting palette in mind that lends these sequences a look and texture that feels almost like a reverent nod to the underbelly dwellers of David Lynch; himself a director who often featured women in daring and prominent roles across his own beloved body of work. These purposeful homages function much in the same way that the century of cinema montage functioned near the end of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (2022), but because it forms the fabric of the narrative and does not feature seven-foot-tall blue alien creatures, it does not seem as jarring to witness. Also absent here is a gratuitous pile of elephant dung, yet The Bride! is arguably much in the same class of weird and wild that Chazelle’s ode to the silver screen – and our connection to these stories – is, too, than something as reverent as, say, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988) or even Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans (2022). It all just goes to show that cinema is for everyone.

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