So yesterday I caught the phantasmagorical brilliance of Maggie Gylenhaal’s The Bride. First I should note I really wasn’t interested in seeing this movie. Why another Frankenstein? Didn’t they just make one with Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi last year? And saying it’s based on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818) novel isn’t a big draw for me. I’ve read the book and it’s . . . okay, mainly iconic for being one of the Gothic classics that originated in the famous Year Without a Summer of 1816. It’s certainly a great idea, one of those stories that demands attention. But enough already. The only thing worse than Frankenstein remakes are Dracula remakes. (There’s one out right now, too, which at least stars the always-good Christopher Waltz.) Or maybe Wolfman remakes. Which is all to say, after arriving at the theater with low expectations, I’m impressed to have liked The Bride so much.
The Bride is a quite a complicated contraption of plot and character. Mary Shelly appears on screen and gives her two cents. There are multiple plots and narratorial threads—including Penelope Cruz and Peter Sarsgaard as detectives on the case—that seem mystifying in the beginning but somehow all come together nicely by the end. Most obviously, it’s a movie about movies. Set in the 1930s, it’s reanimated in the same era of as James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), which famously starred Boris Karloff as the Monster. But Gylenhaal nods to the many other Frankenstein iterations, most notably Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), one of my all-time favorite comedies: There’s an elaborate dance number to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” complete with top hats and canes, reminiscent of the Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle stage-show in that film. The spirited gender-bending hijinks of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) lurk more in spirit than in allusion, while the crime-spree chaos of Natural Born Killers (1994) arises from the cultural popularity of Frank and his Bride. Last but not least, there are numerous echoes of the seminal outlaw-lovers of Bonnie & Clyde (1967). The tagline below works for Frank and his Bride: “They’re young . . . they’re in love . . . and they kill people.”
Critics will no doubt zoom to the feminist message of the film, but that’s a bit reductive. Before I saw it I wondered why Christian Bale would want to play Frankenstein’s Monster (though usually he goes by Frank). He’s great in everything, but my personal favorite is still the classic The Prestige (2006). Now I know why: He gets to cut his chops and chew the scenery in several over-the-top scenes, and makes it all look easy. Jessie Buckley plays the eponymous Bride and does a great job. I liked her performance here better than in Hamnet (2025). It’s audacious, nutty, and way fun—a crazy-good work of art, not simply a story to get a point across.