The Bride! : Chaos theory (review)
Maggie Gyllenhaal revisits a classic of 30’s horror cinema in a film that goes in all directions, for worse and for better and carried by a thunderous duo Jessie Buckley-Christian Bale
The Bride! In this title, everything is in the “!” » which symbolizes the chaos surrounding this idea of revisiting James Whale’s 1935 classic, The Bride of Frankensteinadapted from the work of Mary Shelley. Since 1991, we can no longer count the studios, filmmakers, screenwriters and actresses who have tried to readapt this classic and who have failed… In bulk, we find Universal and Netflix, Martin Scorsese and Bill Condon, Sam Raimi and John Krasinski, David Koepp, Javier Bardem, Angelina Jolie or Gal Gadot… Until Maggie Gyllenhaal took over. Without, however, his film being a walk in the park. Thus, the filmmaker moved from Netflix (which ended up preferring Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro) at Warner and saw the film’s release shifted from October 2025 to March 2026 – excluding it from the Oscar race. Even though Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first feature, The Lost daughterhad just won three Oscar nominations, after winning the award for best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival.
Needless, therefore, to specify that The Bride! (and its 80 million dollar budget) does not arrive on our screens under the best auspices. Hovering over him is the shadow of a possible industrial catastrophe cleverly maintained by the industrial gazettes from across the Atlantic. We can also bet that die-hard fans of horror cinema will stay away from this film, or will cry lèse-majesté. But we cannot deny the director a vision of cinema and above all no one will blame her for seeing her project through to the end, in a thunderous film, which mixes genres and inspirations, color and black and white. It’s undeniably too long, undeniably confusing, but the whole thing basically fits perfectly with the “!” » of its title which carries high the banner of chaos
The film first focuses on Frank – Frankenstein’s creature –, consumed by an increasingly unbearable loneliness and who decides to go to Chicago to ask Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to make him a companion. The scientist then resurrects a woman murdered by a man who could not stand her rebellious nature. From there, very quickly, this funny duo – who will become a real couple – finds themselves pursued by all the police in the country (including inspectors Jake Wiles and Myrna Mallow, respectively played by Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz) after Frank kills two men who were preparing to rape his partner.
The Bride! therefore recounts the azimuth cavalcade of this outlaw couple whose bizarreness and alchemy Maggie Gyllenhaal translates on screen through a maelstrom of sound and fury. The staging, visible, glaring, becomes in fact a character in its own right, which could tense up and exhaust more than one person. However, his film loudly proclaims his love of the seventh art. It goes from scenes that take place in movie theaters to Frank’s passion for a star of the time, Ronnie Reed (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), through all the influences that run through this chase: the musical comedies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bonnie and Clyde, Sailor and Lula, Sid & Nancy but also and above all Joker madness for two!with whom he shares a passion for exuberance.
But the rereading of Shelley’s classic does not only involve its cinema references. By giving Frankenstein’s bride a place and a voice that she was deprived of in Whale’s film, Maggie Gyllenhaal takes The Bride! on the terrain of feminism – but a feminism that is anything but Instagrammable Stormwind. The director is deeply passionate about the question of the monster and goes so far as to make this outlaw on the run a symbol which all the women of the time seize by wearing outrageous makeup like her. This is one of the excellent ideas of this film which, too often, skim over them, preferring to move from one to the other rather than delving into them. Script problem? Disassembly ? In any case, his punk manifesto resembles a puzzle with disparate pieces – like his heroes stitched together everywhere. And here, the 30s never look like the 30s. It is an inexhaustible playground for the two main performers, Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, who take great pleasure in pushing the sliders to the maximum. Their electric interpretations symbolize the divisive side of the film. From start to finish, in substance as in form, in production as in play, in The Bride!everything is chaos!
By Maggie Gyllenhaal. With Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Penelope Cruz… Duration: 2h10. Released March 4, 2026
