{"id":804429,"date":"2026-03-04T23:31:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T23:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/804429\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T23:31:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T23:31:16","slug":"maggie-gyllenhaal-gets-her-rage-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/804429\/","title":{"rendered":"Maggie Gyllenhaal Gets Her Rage on"},"content":{"rendered":"

For all the couple of unspoken minutes Elsa Lanchester appears as the \u201cBride of Frankenstein\u201d in James Whale\u2019s 1935 movie, Maggie Gyllenhaal<\/a> was left wondering, \u201cWhat\u2019s she thinking?\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever Dr. Frankenstein\u2019s Bride was thinking under her conically shaped head of electrocuted hair apparently didn\u2019t amount to much, as the exasperating new film<\/a> from the Oscar-nominated writer\/director of \u201cThe Lost Daughter\u201d and star of \u201cSecretary\u201d and \u201cThe Deuce\u201d inadvertently manages to prove. What \u201cThe Bride!<\/a>\u201d does amount to is a kind of #AskHerMore the movie for our horror-besotted, IP-ravenous times, a wokified, \u201cJoker\u201d-fied feminist opera \u2014 and with punk-rock patches on its sleeves \u2014 that feels caught in the drain somewhere between 2017 and 2020, a tale of female oppression curiously behind the times despite purporting to be a movie for right this minute.<\/p>\n

\"Wunmi<\/a> \"SINNERS,<\/a> <\/p>\n

Directing Jessie Buckley<\/a> in an anguished scream of a performance, Gyllenhaal has said in press interviews<\/a> that she wanted to tell \u201cthe truth\u201d in the package of a pop entertainment. The truth about what? <\/p>\n

What \u201cThe Bride<\/a>!\u201d \u2014 with the most insistent punctuation mark in its title since Emerald Fennell put air quotes around \u201cWuthering Heights<\/a>\u201d barely a month ago \u2014 adds up to is a thuddingly one-note sustained yowl of rage directed at, what, exactly? All the men in the world? All the men in the world that suppressed the here-revisionist proposal that \u201cFrankenstein\u201d author Mary Shelley wanted to write a deeper sequel about the Bride? At a moment when audiences are more than ready to embrace complicated women characters, \u201cThe Bride!\u201d just comes off as retrograde, anchored by a thrashing protagonist who is hardly complicated and instead sustained by nothing but a routinely stacked chord of anger, pain, and more pain \u2014 just with supernatural powers this time.<\/p>\n

Buckley, with her now trademark dislocated jaw of a primal scream that is persistently featured in the \u201cHamnet\u201d clip about to help win her a (yes, deserved) Best Actress Oscar, is a firehose of anger, sure, but it\u2019s one with no specific fire to put out, instead as directionlessly spewing as the many, many ideas Gyllenhaal throws at the wall that don\u2019t stick so much as form a pastichey plaque that whiffs conspicuously of DC Studios. With \u201cJoker\u201d and \u201cJoker: Folie \u00e0 Deux\u201d cinematographer Lawrence Sher and composer Hildur Gu\u00f0nad\u00f3ttir assigned to \u201cThe Bride!\u201d to seemingly repeat much of those previous films\u2019 sensibility, you can almost feel the machinations behind the scenes of Warner Bros. wanting to eventually stitch this Bride into the DC fabric, to perhaps pave the way toward the first De Luca-and-Abdy, Gunn-and-Safran crossover.<\/p>\n

The movie begins with \u201cFrankenstein\u201d author Mary Shelley herself (Buckley) in some kind of psychic communion with a woman named Ida (also Buckley), or is it a split personality? You decide, though I don\u2019t believe Gyllenhaal was intending any ambiguity with an obfuscating device that feels like the clumsy byproduct of relentless screen-testing, which this film underwent (and whose practice at all this film should be a case study for undermining). And when a full-throated Shelley announces, \u201cHere comes the motherfucking Bride!\u201d upon the film\u2019s title card, you\u2019re left digging in your brain for the last time a movie so obviously articulated the very tagline of its poster. <\/p>\n

Ida, meanwhile, is a crime society floozy in 1930s Great Depression Chicago, an escort to a coterie of goombahs who take to mentally torturing her over dinner and drinks in a speakeasy. She\u2019s also\u2026 possessed? If not now, she sure will be. Absinthe-eyed, she projectile-vomits blunt observations and also oysters onto the heavies, overimbibing her way into her own grave once she\u2019s inevitably discarded with a shot and shove down a stairwell (a barely-there John Magaro plays one of the gangsters).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, across town\u2026 \u201cFrank\u201d Frankenstein (Christian Bale, again slimming down to wastrel level for a role it seems like we\u2019ve seen from him before, even though we haven\u2019t) is a walking wound in desperate search of \u201can intercourse,\u201d as he tells scientist Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening, numb). Bale, festooned in a creature design as authentic as a Halloween makeup kit from Party City, is looking to fashion a woman for sex and conversation, and he\u2019s specifically after a Ginger Rogers redheaded type. (An obsession with MGM musicals is here a cute wrinkle to the Frankenstein mythology.) <\/p>\n

Cut to Dr. Euphronious and Frank grave-robbing Ida\u2019s sarcophagus, her corpse outfitted to a slab in her laboratory, brought back to life by tubes attached and \u201cPoor Things\u201d-style cathodes hooked up. Upon one very uncomfortable resurrection, Ida-turned-The-Bride gets the requisite gaslighting, Frank telling her she was once his \u201cfianc\u00e9e,\u201d but this is one pissed-off cookie too smart, and smarted, to buy a line like that.<\/p>\n

\"THE\u2018The Bride!\u2019\u00a9Warner Bros\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

From the platinum shock of Buckley\u2019s hair to outr\u00e9 fashions of the kind that unapologetically flamboyant costumer Sandy Powell <\/a>might perhaps wear herself, the Bride\u2019s look is more \u201cBirds of Prey\u201d harlequin than Vera West (who, uncredited of course, costumed Whale\u2019s film). Like Cruella de Vil stuck her finger in an electrical outlet, or a steampunk Harajuku girl from hell, a mental patient escaped from the Hot Topic pop-up at Arkham Asylum \u2014 which only again, even without DP Sher and composer Gu\u00f0nad\u00f3ttir plagiarizing themselves, underscores how much this movie starts to look gallingly like a Warner Bros. Discovery franchise hopeful waiting to be grafted into the studio\u2019s movie-series bible. <\/p>\n

Packed with 1930s and \u201940s MGM musical references including even a certain someone especially close to Gyllenhaal as a Fred Astaire stand-in, \u201cThe Bride\u201d then unspools like a Gothic \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d or Bauhaus-laden, vaudeville \u201cSid and Nancy,\u201d a \u201cNatural Born Killers\u201d kind of lovers-on-the-run story except\u2026 not good? Buckley and Bale\u2019s chemistry has no juice from the start, the characters too wrapped up in grotesque prosthetics and inky makeup and gender polemics to generate real heat between them. <\/p>\n

It all ends in a rain of bullets directly quoting Warner Bros.\u2019 1967 \u201cBonnie and Clyde,\u201d another misfired opportunity for the studio to launder in the case for its library of vintage all-timers that are fast and vastly disappearing from consciousness and, surely, eventually, streaming and physical media libraries and linear TV networks \u2014 but without any determinable reason for doing so. Along the road of The Bride and Frank\u2019s orgiastic spree, a Berlin-like underground club called Depravation (applause to Gyllenhaal for bringing Swedish music artist Fever Ray to the big screen) could\u2019ve been a showstopping setpiece. Instead, we get something closer to last-call, lights-up at Berghain.<\/p>\n

In fleshly human terms, The Bride learns that her sensuous nerve endings are still very much active, and yes, if you were ever wondering, Frank \u201cFrankenstein\u201d can, in fact, get it up as confirmed by a scene in which The Bride lustily licks his wounds and then goes down on him in a drained gymnasium swimming pool. Despite some weird Cronenberg-lite sex and more than one disarticulated tongue, \u201cThe Bride!\u201d is disappointingly tame in its efforts to push the borders of good taste \u2014 again, likely the result of an over-trust in screen tests in American malls whose audiences perhaps aren\u2019t the best marriage to potentially salacious, sordid material.<\/p>\n

On the run and, also, screaming into the void a lot doing it, The Bride and Frank carve a trail of dead bodies that takes them from Chicago to New York, to Times Square movie palaces in which preshows label them a monstrous couple after they\u2019ve killed a group of men that tried to assault her back in Illinois. (One plaudit for what a reported $80 million will get you: at least this film\u2019s soundstage version of New York looks full of actual people.) <\/p>\n

Trailing behind them is detached gumshoe Detective Jake Wiles (played by Gyllenhaal\u2019s husband Peter Sarsgaard) and his more qualified, competent Girl Friday, Myrna Mallow (like Myrna Loy, the \u201930s movie star. Get it? She\u2019s played by Pen\u00e9lope Cruz). What \u201cThe Bride!\u201d coughs up in the shape of a plot emerges as frustratingly half-digested to the point of illegibility, as Detective Wiles and Buckley\u2019s Ida share an embittered personal history stemming from her mafia days; it\u2019s a narrative the movie never really needed to keep moving, but without it, \u201cThe Bride!\u201d wouldn\u2019t have much story to speak of.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t feel especially good to kick down an emerging female filmmaker on her first studio effort, especially at a moment when Hollywood (and particularly within this film\u2019s studio, Warner Bros.) is imperiled to what some believe to be nearing-exctinction levels. It\u2019s understandable that Gyllenhaal would not feel content to stick to \u201clittle movies\u201d like her 2021 Elena Ferrante adaptation \u201cThe Lost Daughter,\u201d also working from the words of a female author who has spent much of her life cloaked in anonymity. That film sagely tapped into feelings in motherhood often forbidden from discussion, finding a potent gender-political message without saying it crassly, or explicitly, or expressly at all. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bride!\u201d is full of rage and feeling, striking an anarchic pose against oppression. But who it\u2019s yelling at, who it\u2019s yelling on behalf of, remains out of focus, the mystery of whatever Elsa Lanchester\u2019s Bride might\u2019ve been thinking left unanswered.<\/p>\n

Grade: C-<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bride!\u201d opens in theaters Friday, March 6 from Warner Bros. Pictures.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For all the couple of unspoken minutes Elsa Lanchester appears as the \u201cBride of Frankenstein\u201d in James Whale\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":804430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,3063,162188,41921,6082,150591,16,15],"class_list":["post-804429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-jessie-buckley","tag-maggie-gyllenhaal","tag-reviews","tag-the-bride","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116173516640657158","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}