The Bride! (Maggie Gylenhaal, 2025)

Maggie Gylenhaal is one of the few people in the world who can say, “I am a director, and I played one on tv.” Gylenhaal. After a respectable career, where she’d demonstrated her talent and an eye for interesting characters as an actress, it was playing a sex worker turned porn director that gave her the bug to make the move behind the camera. 

Her first film, The Lost Daughter, starred Olivia Colman as a woman vacationing, who develops a kind of obsession with Dakota Johnson’s younger, single mother, which causes her to remember and re-examine her relationship with her own mother, who’d been in a similar situation. It’s a subtle, intelligent exploration of motherhood and the pressures of it in a society that too often treats women as if its the only value they contribute. It’s an excellent, intimate, well written and made independent drama that drew critical praise, demonstrating Gylenhaal’s skil for finding stories about interesting women extended beyond acting, and that as a director she has a keen, probing mind, with the imagination for presenting their inner lives on screen in a way that is compelling and compassionate.

Now, she’s back with The Bride! Starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, with supporting turns from Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard and her brother Jake Gylenhaal, in a bit part. 

Jessie Buckley’s performance in 2025s Hamnet has garnered her an Oscar nomination, and universal critical acclaim. The acclaim she’s been showered with has been of the variety that could easily come across as the work of Hollywood PR firms, trying to build the next star who might be able to carry the ailing business forward, if it weren’t for her body of work. For audiences just being introduced to her through The Bride!, it will be clear there’s no hyperbole in it. If Jessie Buckley doesn’t turn out to be among that line of the screens great actors, it will mean the movie business has been gifted the greatest generation of actors it’s ever seen. 

In The Bride! Gylenhaal reimagines the story of The Bride of Frankenstein, putting her firmly at its center. The character is iconic in the cultural consciousness, but her introduction to the world consisted of a wordless, three minutes of screen time in a film not at all about her. Gylenhaal, in writing a script with an eye toward amending that history, imagines The Bride as an expression of Mary Shelley’s id. Shelley's novel is a work of brilliance, and as much as one of the foundations of why its so brilliant is her grasp on the drives and inner lives of ambitious men, it's does center men and their relationships to each other to the exclusion of all its female characters, and it's hard not to wonder if this was a function of the time.

Shelley was an uncommonly brilliant human being, who in 1818, at the tender age of nineteen wrote a novel that invented science fiction as a genre, became a cornerstone of horror, and has remained one of the most persistently relevant and referenced works of literature in the world. Gylenhaal has said she approached the script with the idea that in the 1800s, as extraordinary as her creation may have been, Shelley would never have been able to write a novel that expressed all of what she might want to say, as a function of being a woman, and the social and literary standards. 

What we get in The Bride! is a howling, kinetic, surreal film, as unwieldy, uninterested in convention, and as driven by the desire for a free, unfettered sense of expression as its main character. Jessie Buckley is monstrous, in an overwhelming, unrestrained, awe striking sense. I’ve seen her in a number of other films at this point, and it was clear she's a committed, talented, deeply passionate actor. None of those other films have given her the opportunity to demonstrate this side of her talent, and it is a thing to behold. There’s a feeling Buckley, in the form of this character, has grabbed the film and us as the audience by extension, by the throat, and drags us through this character’s fever dream of an existence, howling in fury, laughter and the sheer desire to live and experience that life without a yolk. 

Christian Bale is as close to a Movie Star, the top of the “A list,” as we get these days. His resumé is a list of extraordinary performances, in almost every genre and across a shocking variety of characters. Here, Bale deserves recognition for turning in another performance of uncommon commitment, and ceding the spotlight to the degree he does. This is Jessie Buckley’s movie, and because Bale’s performance as Frankenstein’s Monster (Frankie) is so committed, there’s a palpable feeling he’s as besotted with the love of watching Jessie Buckley shine as his character is with The Bride. The list of male actors in Hollywood, with Bale’s profile and reputation, who’d be this committed to making a costar, much less a female costar, take the movie over so wholly and shine as brightly as Buckley does, is exceedingly short. Frankie is, in many ways, the apex of “wife guy,” and the film is all the better for it. 

The Bride! Is an odd film, especially for a major studio film with a budget reportedly around $100 million. It’s not a horror film, in any conventional sense, even as it plays with the iconography of the two of the most recognizable and beloved characters in the genre's history. It has more in common with Bonnie and Clyde in structure and plot than a horror film, but as is testament to the reason horror persists as a genre, the history the film is referencing, both as film history and as cultural and sociological history, is pure horror. To be hunted, to be captured, to be a prisoner, to survive in conditions of persistent violence, and to try to truly live in the face of all it, is the inextricable from fabric of the horror genre. 

The Bride! is likely not going to be a film for everyone, as many of the early reviews are already demonstrating. There is a sense of creative abandon about it that’s usually the stuff of B movies. One of the reasons independent, exploitation and B movies tend to be the precursors for Hollywood trends, those small movies which find some vein the public seems unable to get enough of tapping, before Hollywood decides to get in on the river of money, and give the public more than they could ever want, is that they give filmmakers the opportunity to create without the restrictions inherent in a Hollywood budget and a committee of executives/producers trying to make the film for the widest audience possible. Occasionally, this ends up producing films that carry a certain sense of free, surreal, abundant and overflowing imagination in their approach to storytelling. They are uninterested in the kinds of constraints which make a film what a mass audience expects. 

It’s pretty clear Gylenhaal wasn’t making The Bride! with an eye toward it being the film that was going to give her purchase in the Hollywood ecosystem as a director. It feels much more like a film made by someone who thought this might be the only chance she gets at big budget filmmaking, and she was going to use that budget to put her ideas of what the story of a woman struggling for liberation could be on the screen. It’s a film struggling with the limitations of what we expect that story to look like, in many ways. 

In some ways, the film it shares most in common with is Ryan Coogler’s epic 2025 historical vampire tale currently storming the awards circuit, Sinners. Both films play fast and loose with genre, use narrative conventions in unconventional ways, and center on characters struggling for fulfillment, the ability to be and live as the human beings they are, in the context of social conditions that are designed to constrain them to being someone, something else that they aren't. In Sinners, Smoke and Stack have turned to criminality in the drive to find outlets for the fullness of who they are in the racist confines of 1930s America. The Bride!, as a character and a film, is struggling to find a way to know and be herself, in the fullness of all that is, as a white woman in 1930s America. Both films use the conventions of Hollywood genres, not just to tell their stories, but to reach for a presentation of the ineffable. In Sinners, the big, jaw dropping musical scene at its center is a portrayal of the spiritual, the supernatural link between the past, present and future. In The Bride! they are a window into the interiority of The Bride and Frankie. Both films, by nature of attempting to expand what can be held within the framework of a single narrative film, eschew the expected structure, especially within the context of a Hollywood studio film. 

I could fault no one for finding Sinners the more cohesive of the two films. I’d also suggest that’s a function of necessity created by the differences between the characters, and the basic narrative premise of each film. I find both films utterly exhilarating, exciting in their expansive ambitions and the degree they succeed in being compelling, thrilling viewing experiences. 

I can only hope, the fact that these two films have come from major studios, within a year’s time, signals Hollywood is doing what it did in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. When changing social norms and audience expectations and tastes threatened the studio system's survival, it turned to a new generation, and gave them  license to experiment, in the form of making the films they wanted to make, in the way they wanted to. It changed what was possible, and created a new generation of people as besotted with the power and possibility of film as Frankie is with The Bride, including myself. 

The Bride! and Sinners suggest there’s a generation of filmmakers out there, ready to do the same. They’re steeped in, and obviously love, the way genre and narrative structure have worked in the history of mainstream film. They’ve also clearly internalized those to a degree they are able to experiment with them in interesting, compelling ways, and maybe… if we’re lucky… Hollywood will recognize this, and what we’re seeing is another expansion of what’s possible, which by necessity and nature, will expand what audiences expect from a big budget, mainstream Hollywood film. 

In considering The Bride, I can’t help but wonder if as an entire audience, our ability to accept a maximalist fantasy film has been so shaped by the lack of women behind the camera in mainstream film, we are so unfamiliar with the ways that can and would differ, we interpret it as failure in the ability to sculpt and craft a film as an experience in storytelling. 

It’s true that The Bride! is unwieldy, and tonally uneven, and at the same time, it provides a visceral, engaging, compelling, exhilarating journey and experience, and isn’t confused at all in what it’s saying and trying to express. It’s an exercise in maximalist filmmaking, with experience as extension of the story. It’s big, loud, uncompromising and in your face, in a way completely different, with a whole different set of intentions, than the action minded blockbusters which have been accepted as the preferred studio tentpoles. This maximalist approach to filmmaking, in examples like Sinners, The Bride!, Babylon and a few others, separated from the action fantasy, is a damn good reason to go to the movies.

Personally, I’ll take seventy more experiments by filmmakers reaching to expand the accepted intentions of maximalist, fantasy filmmaking over one more of the Transformers or Fast and Furious films.