The Bride (2026)
I walked into The Bride genuinely curious. Veteran film critics, people who’ve seen everything, were calling it the worst movie they’d ever had to endure professionally. Others called it a masterpiece. That gap doesn’t happen by accident. Sitting in that dark theater, I genuinely didn’t know which camp I was about to join.
Maggie Gyllenhaal wrote and directed this horror romance built on the Frankenstein myth, a scientist reanimates a dead woman to be a companion for the monster who commissioned her creation.
I always try to imagine the pitch meeting to get a movie made. For The Bride, someone presumably leaned across a conference table and said, it’s like Poor Things, but fun and edgier. It’s not. At best, it’s a movie straining to be fun and edgy. Much of it is shot with an unsteady handheld camera in tight close-up. The effect is disorienting, and over time, genuinely nauseating.
For every interesting idea, like the consent angle of having your dead body reanimated without permission, there are five that collapse under their own weight. A joyless song and dance number lifting from Young Frankenstein lands with a thud. It keeps lunging for clever and coming up empty.
What a waste of some of the best talents of our day. The astoundingly talented Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale are hung out to dry by the script and Gyllenhaal’s vision. It’s as if she got her best students drunk at theater camp, tossed a trunk full of costumes at them, and kept screaming “act harder!”
At its core, The Bride wants to be a Sid and Nancy tragic revenge love story, Frankenstein’s monster and his wild, ungovernable companion burning everything down together. That’s actually an interesting movie. But Gyllenhaal can’t commit to it. Is it a detective story? A mob picture? A Joker-style parable about societal upheaval? The film auditions four different identities and never casts one.
At one point, Ida yells “This is a brain attack.” As a description of what The Bride does to its audience, she’s not wrong.
The Bride gets a 4 out of 10.
Jim Chandler is a morning radio host on Nashville’s Totally Hits 93.3 and a member of the Music City Film Critics Association.
Untitled Film Project 