Last November, Guillermo del Toro’s faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic premiered on Netflix to lukewarm critical reception. Nevertheless, 2025’s Frankenstein is nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Jacob Elordi’s portrayal of the monster. Just a few months later and Maggie Gyllenhaal has written and directed an ambitious loose take on 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein starring Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley, who is odds-on to win Best Actress at the Academy Awards next week for her sensational performance in Hamnet. Sadly, as is often the case with likely Oscar winners, the star’s next film can tend to be something of a miss. And this is especially true of this absolute shocker.
It’s difficult to fathom just how The Bride! was greenlit, considering the self-indulgent nonsense I had to withstand over its two-hour runtime. Bale plays a lonely Frankenstein’s monster, who has somehow found himself in 1930s Chicago over a century on from the events of Shelley’s novel. Approaching Annette Bening’s not particularly eccentric or mad scientist, Dr Euphronius, he asks her to ‘rejuvenate’ him a mate. Luckily for Frank, there’s the fresh corpse of Jessie Buckley’s Ida ready to dig up after her sudden death at a speakeasy where she’d had what appeared to be a multiple personality disorder episode. For much of the film, she switches between a Margot Robbie Harley Quinn voice and a posh British accent that’s supposed to represent Shelley the author, who she also plays in strange monologue scenes. No doubt expecting to come across as profound, the duel-performance and dialogue Buckley is required to spew is nothing short of annoying, pretentious drivel. To be frank(enstein), I’d already had enough of this film by the end of the opening sequence.
Together with Bale’s besotted Frankenstein, the pair set off across Depression-era America as a undead Bonnie and Clyde, pursued by Penélope Cruz’s detective who jarringly defies the sexism of the era to little believable resistance. The zombie couple spend a lot of time in cinemas watching the film’s only redeeming feature, Maggie’s brother Jake Gyllenhaal’s cameo as a black and white movie star, Ronnie Reed. Lurking beneath this monstrosity of a picture is some attempt at social commentary, but it’s all but lost amid the chaos. When Lady Gaga’s Joker: Folie à Deux and Emma Stone’s Poor Things already exist as superior Bride of Frankenstein motifs of recent years, why does this incoherent babble need to exist? Send this rotting corpse back to the graveyard where it belongs.
The Bride! hits cinemas on Friday.
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