Here Comes 'The Bride!'

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Here Comes The Bride!

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By Ben Elliott

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It’s been a big month for gothic authors at the movies.

Just as we say goodbye to Emerald Fennell’s polarizing take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Maggie Gyllenhaal reanimates Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in The Bride!. Where Fennell massively reworked Brontë’s text to her liking, Gyllenhaal aims to speak for Shelley by blasting past the novel and imagining the kind of riotous, feminist story she might have written if her life hadn’t been cut short by tragedy.

Two friends chasing floating legs in a red room from House, 1977

The Bride!, 2026

Shelley’s spirit possesses the film from the jump, speaking to the audience from the great beyond. Claiming she has more story to tell, she works her way into the mind of Ida (Jessie Buckley), a gangster’s girlfriend in 1930s Chicago. When Shelley forces Ida to spill some inconvenient truths about a local mob boss, Ida winds up dead and on the table of Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), who reanimates her at the request of Shelley’s iconic monster (Christian Bale). Bodies continue to pile up as “Frankie” and his bride connect, and they soon hit the road like a monstrous Bonnie and Clyde.

A young woman holding a severed head in House, 1977

The Bride!, 2026

It’s a twisty mix of meta commentary and historical revision that embraces camp with a straight face, seamlessly transitioning from a cameo by Swedish electronic musician Fever Ray into a Busby Berkeley–inspired dance sequence. None of it would work without Buckley at the center, who’s clearly having a blast as she whipsaws between Ida and Shelley in an exuberant performance that makes the restraint and control she brought to her Oscar-nominated role in Hamnet all the more impressive.

“The dead have something to say, and I’m saying it,” Ida shouts as she and Frankie face down the cops. It’s Gyllenhaal’s rallying cry — an attempt to give women silenced throughout history their voices back. The truth can’t be buried when the dead don’t die, and The Bride! is here to ask how we’ll live with it.

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