Caught up last night with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s THE BRIDE! (Warner Bros., 2026), which I found to be a truly inspired rumination on THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935). Though it pretends the 1935 James Whale film never happened, it rewrites what might be looked upon as its gatekeeping, in that it silenced its title character all except for her swan-like hiss, which it revives and imbues with a most eloquent voice and insatiable anger. I loved the performances of Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale as the monster and his mate, and followed the story, nuance by nuance, as a contemporary essay on Mary Shelley’s original story, the films based on it, and what we’ve done to it with decades of crazy spin-offs. This is certainly one of the craziest but also the smartest; though it’s set in an alternate 1936, it’s very much about our era and its recent attempts to silence women, and while the story is action-packed and crazed (a nice old-fashioned word) with incident, I felt like I was following a very serious and intelligent essay about cinema at the same time.
This doesn’t mean I was happy about all of it, though. Gyllenhaal cast her husband (Peter Sarsgaard) and brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) in two key roles, as a compromised detective and as the Monster’s favorite movie star respectively, and I felt both parts were unfortunately miscast. I’ve liked them both in other roles but didn’t feel that either even half-filled the shoes of these important characters, which led to the film feeling off-balance whenever the storytelling shifted over to them. Annette Bening and Jeannie Berlin, however, were on the money as the “reinvigorating” doctor and her macabre maid.
The other thing that that bothered me is that the early part of the film finds the Monster particularly eloquent (which allowed me to see Bale as an extension of Boris Karloff, if only a spiritual one), and Buckley as a veritable fountain of words, which is shown to connect her to the spirit of Mary Shelley. But once she’s reanimated, both characters seem to lose their sense of poetry as they set off on their rampage. I can see how this was essential to the Bride character, and I can also see how the Monster’s vocabulary might come to embrace her coarseness as they fell in love, but I regretted that such an initial command of language would give way to an inarticulate barrage of salt.
Even so, I find this film an important evolutionary step for these characters and I regret that its mixed critical response didn’t send more people out to theaters to greet it. I suspect, though, that they will find it now that it’s come to streaming and that it will become one of those deceptively zany, underlyingly profound movies that respondents of a special nature will revisit often.
While I’m not sure whether Mr. Karloff would have appreciated this colorful spin-off, I have a feeling that Elsa Lanchester (who recorded an entire album of bawdy Cockney songs) would have embraced it whole-heartedly.
(C) 2026 Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
