So, I'm thirty minutes out from a screening of The Bride and as much as I dearly want to love it, I can't help but feel it's a hot mess and a missed opportunity. Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale are clearly working their arses off and carrying the film, and it's a shame they were given so little of substance to work with because this could have been a work of genius, something genuinely profound, with a more streamlined script and a little more bravery.
Just some quick thoughts for now.
So let's start with the beginning. As a monster movie nerd, I appreciated the callback to 1935's Bride of Frankenstein with its opening, with Mary Shelley setting the scene. But what should have been a great framing device quickly felt childish and intrusive and almost immature in places. Admittedly, that might be me post-childbirth, but I feel a lot of affinity with poor Mary, and her use in this became grating quickly.
Reducing Mary Shelley to an object of amusement and ridicule is a strange choice when you consider where her work on Frankenstein came from. This seems to lean into the idea that Mary must have been weird, did she bang someone in a graveyard that I struggle to take seriously.
Shelley's Frankenstein wasn't written in a vacuum; it was borne out of grief, personal tragedy, ahem some grooming and arguably the suffocating sexism of an era that refused to take a young woman's intellect seriously.
Treating Shelley as comic relief feels less like a fresh take and more like a disservice not just to her legacy, but to the very themes the film claims to care about.
The greatest tragedy of Gyllenhaal's The Bride is that it dips its toe into the waters of femicide but never fully commits to it. The moments where I felt most connected to the Bride as a character were when she reeled off the names of murdered women. Buckley gave a full-body performance, and I thought that was genuinely affecting but ultimately wasted. As soon as it had appeared the film simply moved on, as if it had discharged some obligation and could return to its Frankenstein road trip.
There is a feminist uprising that flickers into existence briefly, but it lands with no real weight and leaves no lasting impression on the narrative. It exists to gesture at an idea rather than actually explore it.
The Bride is a woman who has literally been resurrected from the remains of a murdered woman, who has no memory of her previous life, no memory of her own killing and is struggling to recover her sense of self and her identity.
The bride could have been a vessel for feminine grief. What feels like a more effective approach would have been if the Bride had begun to remember, not her own past specifically, but the names, the faces, the fates of women like her. Literally becoming the voice of the dead and their avenger. That violence, injustice and pain became fuel for something bigger, a crusade of vengeance, with Frank stumbling along in her wake, trying to make sense of what motivates the Bride, while she is trying to figure that out.
But instead, they follow Frank's agenda, stopping at film theatres, indulging his whims, and the Bride is subordinated to his desires even in a film that seems to want to be about her liberation. The road trip structure isn't a bad plot device, but the way it's used here keeps the Bride reactive rather than active.
Male Complicity in the Patriarchy
Peter Sarsgaard's Jake is one of the film's more interesting but repugnant characters. His line delivered to Myrna while they drive to the crime scene in Indiana, after she wants credit for tracking down the Bride and Frank "you know that's not my decision," is for most women a familiar one where a man ignores his part in the structures that oppress her. It's the typical behaviour of every man who has ever acknowledged a wrong while carefully exempting himself from responsibility for it.
He feels bad about it, but it's never his fault. It's just how it is. He's not the one doing this, you know that, right? He's one of the good ones who would change it if he could.
And yet, of course, his inaction is exactly what props up the structures he claims not to endorse. He's the "good guy".
He chooses to be blind to the fact that his passive obedience is what feeds the oppression his colleague, Mryna, is pushing against. The patriarchy doesn't sustain itself only through its active enforcers; it depends on the passive compliance of men who could intervene and simply choose not to. Jake's ambivalent shrug of not my decision is, in its way, as damning as anything the film's more overtly monstrous men do.
This attitude of that's just how it is, contributes to the murders of multiple women and the lack of justice for them. Jake is more motivated by having sex with a witness and potential victim than he is to fight for justice for murdered women and he lies to himself about his motivations.
Frank, meanwhile, is a more complicated and ultimately more honest portrait of the same problem. He is, in many ways, pitiable. He is lonely, affection-starved in a cruel world, genuinely wanting connection, and the film deserves some credit for not letting that become an excuse.
Frank's entitlement is still entitlement even if it has origins you can empathise with.
He wants a female companion, wants intimacy and gratification and companionship, and the fact that he had to deny the Bride her autonomy and her very identity to obtain it is treated as a feature of his monstrousness rather than something to be explained away by his circumstances. Like the character of Jake, he feels bad about it, but his needs and desire for comfort override those of the Bride.
Another missed opportunity is that the film doesn't go far enough with it. There was a genuine character arc available here, where Frank's journey forces him to confront the gap between the woman he constructed and the person she was and is becoming, and to reckon with what it means to want someone as a person rather than as a possession. His desperation for a companion is arguably what drives him to accept the bride rather than any growth in him as a character.
MeToo and the Misogyny of 2026
The film's MeToo references don't feel like they land. They feel, if not exactly dated, but at least overtaken in a post-Epstein files world. There is a version of this film that might have grappled with that and added something of substance to how we view and tackle misogyny both in our media and daily life, but the world's shifted, and it feels like the Bride should have been released five years ago. That's not entirely something the film can be blamed for, but it does leave the film feeling like the ground shifted while it was still filming.
I don't want to be overly negative. Buckley and Bale are, throughout all of this, masters of their craft and watching them and their chemistry and individual perfomances is genuinely what kept me watching.
Buckley is a powerhouse when depicting the raw energy of the Bride when it comes to dancing in a club or screaming at the 1% as they sup on champagne and oysters. Bale provides a monster that is both empathetic and troubling while cutting a pathetic figure as he tries to make his way through the world.
That they both somehow manage to make you care as much as I did about their characters in this hot mess is a testament to their abilities, and the fact that their efforts aren't quite enough to save the film is less a reflection on them than on the scale of what they were asked to carry. The Bride had the foundations to become something extraordinary and a genuinely fresh take on a 200 year old story.
Despite what feels like negativity, I genuinely appreciate a film that aims high and doesn't manage to hit the heights it's aiming for. This could have been great, but it just needed someone with the courage to give the bride's rage a focus and purpose rather than just following the whims of men.
