I am a robust champion of female film-makers, if only because, by their scant representation within a rigged boys’ club — only nine women directors in the top 100 grossing movies of 2025 — they’ve a far greater hit rate than their male counterparts. If a woman has directed it, in short, chances are it’s going to be good.
But The Bride! is not good. It’s a howling misfire for the actress turned director Maggie Gyllenhaal who has, in this latest flashy Frankenstein reboot, abandoned all the artistic integrity she displayed in her stunning debut, The Lost Daughter. She has replaced it with the easy noise of hollow posturing, with dramatic incoherence and with a central performance from the Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley that is so astonishingly poor and so catastrophically ill-judged that it almost needs to be seen to be believed.
Buckley is playing Ida, a dead 1930s Chicago flapper brought back to life to become the bride of Christian Bale’s reanimated creature, now officially called Frankenstein and living in a 20th-century world where Mary Shelley’s 19th-century novel is simultaneously non-fiction and fantasy (don’t ask). Ida, however, is also possessed by the undead spirit of Mary Shelley.
Christian Bale as Frank and Jessie Buckley as IdaNiko Tavernise/warner bros
What this means, alas, is that for the entire film Ida will, mostly mid-sentence, suddenly perform a zany head-shake and, fully Shelley-possessed, launch into a deranged and frightfully “posh” English accent, with awkward shades of Stewie from Family Guy, while barking out nonsense verbiage that seemingly reflects only Shelley’s appreciation of synonyms. Ida, for instance, feels revolting. “I’m revolting!” Buckley says, in her Chicago accent, before shaking her Shelley awake and then barking, Stewie-style, “Revolting! Insurrection! Outbreak! Coup!” It goes on like this. All, through, the, film. Right. Until. The. End. “End! End! Final! Complete! Termination! Culmination! Somebody! Make! It! Stop!”
The cultural reference here is possibly Peter Sellars from Dr Strangelove, but it lands as Jim Carrey doing “comedy schizophrenia” in Me, Myself and Irene. It makes sense why The Bride! is being released a day after the final Oscar ballots are cast. If Academy voters witnessed Buckley’s performance here, her turn in Hamnet might be viewed in a new and unflattering light. She does, incidentally, the famous “Hamnet howl” here too, twice.
None of this is Buckley’s fault. Actors give themselves over to their directors. But when their directors are also actors it can be a recipe for naval-gazing disaster — see Ryan Gosling’s The River, or Johnny Depp’s The Brave.
The film eventually becomes an undead lovers-on-the-lam crime movie, with Bale’s Frankenstein and Buckley’s Shelley-possessed Ida murdering their way across the eastern US, and following in the biographical footsteps of the fictional 1930s screen icon Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). They’re pursued by two detectives, played woefully by the double act of Peter Sarsgaard (aka Mr Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Penélope Cruz. Sarsgaard’s Jake Wiles performs a set-piece speech in which he bemoans the state of a society that refuses to acknowledge women’s equality. Later, Shelley-possessed Ida will round on a room of male abusers and scream, “Me too! Me too! Me too!”
This is intellectually specious and ethically dubious. You can’t simply hide bad art underneath political messaging. Yes, we need movies, urgently, that fully address Epstein, Pelicot and all the male monsters of the world, and this week’s brilliant Sound of Falling, from the German female director Mascha Schilinski, arguably does that in spades. But slapping the phrase “Me too” onto a sloppy, ham-fisted vanity project doesn’t cut it.
★☆☆☆☆
15A, 127min
In cinemas from Mar 6
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