Maggie Gyllenhaal’s latest film “The Bride!” is a wild mess which alternatively fascinates and distracts you. Loosely inspired by Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic novel “Frankenstein”, the movie attempts to try a lot of different things ranging from horror to musical, but the overall result is a bit too jumbled and jarring on the whole, and I only ended up getting more exhausted even while enjoying its wild style and mood to some degree.

The movie, which is set in the 1930s, is actually a variation of James Whale’s famous sequel film “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935). “Frank” (Christian Bale), who is Dr. Frankenstein’s notorious creation, comes to Chicago for meeting Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), a scientist whose research has been influenced a lot by his creator’s. Having been quite lonely (and horny) for more than 100 years, Frank wants to have a spouse not so different from him, and Dr. Euphronious is eventually persuaded to do the job for her special visitor.

Needless to say, they need a suitable body for their project, but, what do you know, that soon comes handy to them. As shown from the opening sequence, a young woman happens to get killed and then promptly buried in a local graveyard, and Frank and Dr. Euphronious subsequently dig up her grave in the middle of one dark night.

 The following procedure turns out to be much more successful, but “The Bride” (Jessie Buckley) is quite wild to say the least for a rather inexplicable reason. Right before her death, she somehow got possessed by what can be regarded as the wraith of Mary Shelley, and this angry and tempestuous entity remains with her even after she is alive again thanks to Dr. Euphronious, who is certainly fascinated by how the result is a lot more interesting than expected. 

Anyway, Frank finds himself more attracted to the Bride – even when she causes a lot of trouble for both of them. After having a wild time at a local night dance club full of deliberately anachronistic touches, they find themselves on the run due to one unfortunate incident, and that is when a cynical detective named Jakes Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his resourceful Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz) enter the picture. While it does not take much time for Mallow to track down the Bride and Frank, Wiles does not seem particularly willing to catch them and then close the case, and we are not so surprised when it later turns out later that he actually knows something about the Bride.      

As Frank and the Bride try to evade the police as long as possible, they become all the more notorious in public, and this surely remind you of Arthur Penn’s great film “Bonny and Clyde” (1967) and its many juniors such as Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” (1994). As they cause more troubles here and there around the country, Frank and the Bride become a sort of folk heroes, and the Bride inadvertently causes a sort of radical female revolution in an alarming way not so far from Todd Phillip’s “Joker” (2019).

In this loony mix between horror and crime drama, the movie also adds another distinctive genre element. Frank is actually a big fan of the popular Hollywood musical movies of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), a famous dancer/singer whom Frank once encountered many years ago. When he and the Bride happen to sneak into a party attended by Reed and many other well-dressed guests, they certainly draw the attention from others around them, and what follows next is a wild and wacky cross between Mel Brooks’ classic parody comedy film “Young Frankenstein” and Chuck Russell’s “The Mask” (1994). Although there is not much explanation on how Frank and the Bride can make some of the party guests sing and dance along with them, the result is insanely amusing, and you will admire how willing Gyllenhaal and her crew members including cinematographer Lawrence Sher and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, who incidentally worked together in “Joker”, are to do anything for more style and craziness to be mixed into the film. 

In case of the two lead performers of the movie, they also willingly hurl themselves into many looney moments in the story without much restraint. Looking quite different from her recent Oscar-nominated turn in Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” (2025), Jessie Buckley, who previously collaborated with Gyllenhaal in “The Lost Daughter” (2021), cheerfully swings from one extreme mode to another, and the result surely shows more of the undeniably wide range of her considerable acting talent. On the opposite, Christian Bale dutifully complements his co-star with his equally over-the-top acting, and his and Buckley’s total commitment holds the film together even when it does not work as well as intended.

In case of several notable supporting performers in the film, they are a rather mixed bag in my humble opinion. While Annette Bening and Jeannie Berlin, who plays a dutiful housemaid of Bening’s character, are delightfully hammy as required, Peter Sarsgaard, who is incidentally Gyllenhaal’s husband, and Penélope Cruz are mostly stuck in their straight roles, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who is Gyllenhaal’s younger brother, has some little fun with his ridiculous supporting character.

In conclusion, “The Bride!” is too uneven and incoherent for recommendation in addition to being less impressive than Guillermo del Toro’s recent Oscar-nominated film “Frankenstein” (2025), but its jumbled result is a bit more interesting and successful than Emerald Fennell’s “The Wuthering Heights” (2026), which is a loose adaptation of that famous 1847 gothic romance novel by Emily Brontë. Although it is two or three steps from what she wonderfully achieved in “The Lost Daughter”, Gyllenhaal seems to have all the fun she can get here, and I can only hope that she will soon move onto better things to come.