(Above: Jessie Buckley in THE BRIDE! (2026) via IMDB.)

By M. Faust

THE BRIDE!, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is a hysterical mess. Consider that a recommendation. 

I say this in full recognition that the term “hysterical” is derived from the Greek word for “womb,” and came into common usage as a faux medical diagnosis for “difficult” women. Sometimes the best way to defang an insult is to adapt it to your own purposes.

As for “mess,” well, I’m trying to be terse there. The film, made on a large budget with the backing of a big studio that more or less let Gyllenhaal have her rein, plays like a fever dream, shifting among moods and styles, glancing at themes that go undeveloped, caring little for historical accuracy. And it does so joyously and energetically. It is, I think, everything that Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis wanted to be. 

Jessie Buckley, who by this time next week may be an Oscar winner for her starring performance in Hamnet, stars in the title role. As was the case with Elsa Lancaster in the iconic 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, she also plays author Mary Shelley, here narrating a new tale from the afterlife. (That she is apparently composing the story as we watch it would be one way to explain what might seem to be the story’s inconsistencies.) 

The premise: It is Chicago in the early 1930s. Frankenstein’s monster, played with soulful ferocity by Christian Bale, yearns for human experiences that have been denied him. He visits Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a medical researcher familiar with his case, and asks her to provide him a mate. Her preferred specialty is “reinvigoration,” so rather than building a companion out of bits and pieces, she exhumes the body of a recently deceased young woman and restores her to life. She has little memory of her past, so she is willing to accept that before her “accident” she has agreed to marry this off-looking fellow whose head and body are covered in scars. 

From there, the movie takes off in a chaotic style that situates it in the “misfit lovers” genre: Bonnie and Clyde, Natural Born Killers, Wild at Heart, Raising Arizona. The tone isn’t overtly comic, but there are enough tongue-in-cheek gags to let you know that you’re not meant to take any of this too seriously. (An example: our lovers are chased out of a movie theater and into the streets by a crowd that somehow acquires a few burning torches.) Around mid-film, there is a musical number that could have come straight out of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (another movie with an exclamation point baked into its title). 

Obviously, this all has a strong vein of feminism. In the 1935 movie, The Bride appears for only a few minutes, just long enough to express her displeasure with the situation. Gyllenhaal’s entry into this story was wondering what that resurrected character might have done with more time. But THE BRIDE!’s most prominent theme is reinvigoration, a willingness to make of your life not what others tell you it should be but instead what you think you want it to be. Its oft-repeated motto, from Herman Melville, is “I would prefer not to.”

That the film is already being called a box office bomb is in no way a reflection of its quality. The poor ticket sales don’t mean that people don’t like it, simply that they aren’t for whatever reason going to see it. Don’t make that mistake or wait for it to come to your living room.