First published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in no danger of going out of style. Last fall, Guillermo del Toro brought us his adaptation of the novel. In 2023, Poor Things offered a saucy take on the mythos, with Emma Stone winning an Oscar for her performance as an unruly reanimated Victorian corpse.
A sizable contingent of viewers, however, objected to Poor Things’ raunchy depiction of female self-realization, noting that the movie was neither written nor directed by a woman. They might prefer The Bride!, an irreverent new twist on the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, scripted and helmed by part-time Vermont resident Maggie Gyllenhaal.
The deal
Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) is dead, but she has things to say. Addressing the audience as “darlings,” the deceased author announces we’re about to see the version of Frankenstein she didn’t dare write in her lifetime — a version that tells the shocking truth about being a woman.
We then find ourselves in 1936 Chicago, where Mary’s salty spirit proceeds to possess a young woman named Ida (also Buckley). Mary unleashes Ida’s latent hatred of the patriarchy, but when she calls out the evil doings of the local crime boss, she meets a speedy, violent end.
Meanwhile, Frankenstein’s monster, or “Frank” (Christian Bale), is somehow real, also in Chicago and still lonely for female companionship. He enlists Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), a modern-day mad scientist skilled in “reinvigoration” of the dead, to make him a mate.
Naturally, the corpse they use is Ida’s. Reborn as “the Bride,” fueled by Ida’s good-time-girl thirst for life and Mary’s eloquence and rage, our heroine has doubts about an arranged marriage to a dour monster. But she does know she wants to party. The Bride and Frank embark on a wild road trip across America, becoming celebrity criminals as they leave dead men and befuddled detectives in their wake.
Will you like it?
I had the strangest sense of déjà vu while watching the movie. The more Mary’s ghost insisted that the story was explosively new, the more retro and familiar it seemed … almost as if I’d watched a similarly star-studded updating of Bride of Frankenstein 40 years ago. Finally, my memory dredged up 1985’s The Bride (see sidebar), a movie that my teenage self had rushed to the nearest mall multiplex to see, only to despise it as heavy-handed and “too MTV.”
The Bride! has a whole different plot from The Bride, and I have no doubt it’s the better film, if only for the production design, the cinematography, the lead performances and the gloriously chaotic musical sequences. Gyllenhaal has a lot of ideas about institutionalized misogyny and women’s sexual pleasure, and she puts them all into the mouth of the Bride, who spews forth Mary’s pent-up thoughts as if she’s speaking in tongues. (Or like a thesaurus — Mary is fond of word association.)
Quoting the classic resistance motto “I prefer not to,” from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the Bride is a proto-punk rebel with a literary pedigree. Her Frank is a sensitive theater kid at heart, obsessed with a silver-screen star (Jake Gyllenhaal) who has a disability. Frank’s also a bit of an incel, but the fiery Bride always has the option of leaving him in the dust. What’s not to love?
For all these strong points, I can’t help thinking that my problem with The Bride is also my essential problem with The Bride! Gyllenhaal’s film is the 2026 equivalent of “too MTV” — vibes driven. It’s built on a fun aesthetic, stuffed with cultural references and timely talking points, and action-packed. But it never slows down enough to develop organic relationships between its characters, and that’s its downfall.
Frank and the Bride rarely talk — they grunt and pontificate and scream, like two drunks on an endless bender. The Bride’s murderous violence (always directed at cops or attempted rapists) provokes fits of remorse, yet her character seems too stuffed with ideological baggage to evolve in any natural way.
The movie gives more breathing time to scenes involving the two detectives on the case (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz), allowing the actors to develop some chemistry. But their subplot is ham-handed, belatedly supplying the characterization of pre-possession Ida that we never got to see on-screen.
While Shelley’s Frankenstein is about asserting your worth as an individual when others call you a monster, The Bride! explores a more postmodern, crowdsourced form of subjectivity that never quite gels. Presenting a spin-off of a classic as the real story the long-dead author meant to tell — even with an ironic wink — takes guts. I hope Gyllenhaal will keep taking big swings like that as a filmmaker, but for me this one was a miss.
If you like this, try…
The Bride (1985; rentable): Initially, I thought I’d hallucinated this earlier attempt to put a feminist spin on Bride of Frankenstein, but no: Jennifer Beals (of Flashdance) plays the title character, Sting is Baron Frankenstein, and Clancy Brown is the monster.
Lisa Frankenstein (2024; rentable): Directed by Zelda Williams and written by Diablo Cody, this horror rom-com about a 1980s high schooler and her corpse boyfriend is developing a cult following.
Frankenstein (2025; Netflix): Nominated for nine Oscars, Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation follows Shelley’s own vision of the “monster” as not a monster at all. Far from lumbering and grumbling, Jacob Elordi plays a bookish emo type with daddy issues.
This article appears in March 11 • 2026.
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