Even before Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes a black-bile-spewing revenant, you wouldn’t call her a proper lady. At a shady gin joint in Chicago, 1936, she’s vacant-eyed, slurring, and lurching in her seat when she launches into a tirade against the local Mafia. The gangsters tolerate her until she rises up and vomits all over their king (Zlatko Buric), a toad-faced godfather who promptly orders his minions to give her the whack. And so they do, in this opening scene of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a jangly reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with a post–#Me Too spin. In this vision, loud, leaky, nasty women are ideal monsters to navigate issues of power, consent, and narrative control.
At the end of Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s monster yearned for companionship, begging his master to create him not just a friend but a “bride,” whose similarly abominable construction will allow her to empathize with him and tolerate his presence. In Gyllenhaal’s movie, Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening) grants the monster, “Frank” (Christian Bale), this wish when she zaps Ida to life. The resurrected Ida has a new look: a puff of platinum blonde hair etched with finger waves and a splash of black ink across the side of her mouth. She doesn’t remember her name, who she is, or where she came from, but otherwise Ida is the same cackling debauchee we saw in the bar. Frank is delighted. Chivalrous, prudish, and naïve, he at the very least has the wits to tell Ida that they were a couple before her “accident” and to profess to admire her intellect. “You have an amazing vocabulary,” he observes, adoringly.
Nevertheless, Frank gets feisty after a few drinks and brutally kills two thugs who tried forcing themselves on Ida. These actions make the headlines, turning The Bride! into an outlaw drama that spins out in frenzied, genre-spanning directions: A pair of wry detectives, Jake (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna (Penelope Cruz), are hot on the monsters’ heels; so is one of the mobster kingpin’s cronies (John Magaro), who’s been tasked with getting rid of Ida once and for all; Ida is occasionally plunged into the depths of her unconscious, where she consults with Mary Shelley herself (Buckley, again, in a gothy getup).
This encounter between Ida and Shelley reminds us that Frankenstein’s monster—for all its iterations throughout the last century of pop culture—derives from a woman’s mind. And so it’s curious that there are so few female versions of the Creature across the dozens of films and shows in which it appears, including, most recently, Guillermo Del Toro’s (relatively faithful yet sleepy adaptation) Frankenstein (2025). Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023) stages a man-made woman’s moral and intellectual awakening, and Diablo Cody’s Lisa Frankenstein (2024) follows a teenager who reanimates a corpse and tries to “fix” him into the man of her dreams. Yet Gyllenhaal’s feminist Frankenstein seems to want to rewrite the myth itself—or at least reimagine the Hollywood version of it.
Frank claims to have been born in 1819, the year after Frankenstein’s publication, so it’s telling that he meets Ida over one hundred years later—right around the time when the iconography of Frankenstein had begun to appear on the silver screen. At the end of the 1935 film, Frankenstein’s bride rejects the monster’s hand, preferring death, it would seem, to a lifetime of subordination. Gyllenhaal has her bride signal her independence in a very different way: Ida not only shirks convention as a club-going, hard-drinking, sex-having vigilante, she is also presented with the capacity to love and to be loved by Frank on her own terms, though their romance—its authenticity and fraudulence—also explores the limits of heterosexual coupling in a patriarchal world. When a woman dares to upend gendered dynamics, she is a monster, is the film’s spirited proposition—even if, in Gyllenhaal’s hands, it lands with a thud.
Among the film’s more clever traits is its metacinematic approach to Hollywood history. Ida quickly finds out that Frank is a raging fanboy for the fictional song-and-dance star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose movies he rewatches obsessively. A dark theater, any moody cinephile will tell you, is an extraordinary comfort for the downbeat and lonesome, so it makes sense that poor Frank would find solace on the screen. Ida and Frank plot out their travels based on Ronnie Reed screenings happening around the East Coast, and Frank routinely projects himself and Ida onto the films within the film: In a Busby Berkeley–style dance number, he appears as one of the tuxedoed chorus boys, and in a shipboard romance, Frank’s and Ida’s faces replace those of the leading couple.
Perverting these cinematic templates, while also calling attention to the delusions and desires motivating Frank’s displacement, makes for a productively ambivalent tribute to that era. The film’s spectacular period settings, especially when the action shifts to Manhattan with its scintillating marquees and packed houses, may demonstrate a certain nostalgia for a time when movie culture was capable of meaningfully organizing public life; yet Frank’s parasocial relationship to Reed is a reminder that the movies don’t love back, and that they historically have held very little space for people like Frank and Ida—literal monsters, here, being a convenient catchall for all manner of the oppressed.
Gyllenhaal, in part, seeks to rework this history, giving the Bride her spotlight, yes, but also casting women in professions that the movies themselves have reinforced as masculine domains. Myrna reveals herself to be a far more talented sleuth than Jake, though she continuously is faced with skepticism from her male colleagues; and even Frank is surprised to learn that Dr. Euphronious is, in fact, a woman.
But if Frank’s fantasies of assimilation prove pathetic, firebrand Ida embraces her outsider status to spark social unrest. Halfway through the film, Ida and Frank crash a glitzy downtown affair, posing as waiters while feasting on shrimp cocktail, outlaw life having left them penniless and hungry. This charade devolves into a choreographed dance sequence with intentionally weird, jagged moves at odds with the ballroom’s propriety. Here, Jake and Myrna catch up with them, along with dozens of cops ready to lock ’em up, only for Ida to grab a gun and start menacing the crowd, even threatening to kill Ronnie to leverage her and Frank’s escape. The scene is total nonsense, a jumble of provocations that have no stakes or dramatic effect. Ida takes this opportunity to monologue about corruption and abuse of the marginalized before the crowd of partygoers and policemen, though she lacks the power and gravitas she is aiming to convey. When the press throws Ida on the front page, she ignites a feminist revolution, in which other women adopt her style and pursue their own forms of vigilante justice, a romanticized rebellion that shrivels into cringe content.
As a number of films from the past decade or so show (Birds of Prey, 2020; Cruella, 2021; Joker: Folie à deux, 2024), there’s something plastic about backstories and redemption plots issued as correctives to past minimizations and/or simplifications of female characters, especially when whatever good intentions might motivate such “inclusive” storytelling almost always appear secondary to capitalizing on preexisting intellectual property. To Gyllenhaal’s credit, the film’s empowerment messaging feels sincere; it’s just also obvious and goofy, no thanks to Buckley’s ham-fisted performance, a caricature of female madness that strains to be believed. (She delivers a similar gloopy maximalism in Hamnet, for which she won an Oscar.)
Following Ida’s antiauthoritarian theatrics, Ida and Frank come to realize the full extent of their repulsiveness to society, and resolve victoriously to throw caution entirely to the wind and truly “live.” Their sex life improves, or, rather, begins, as a result; and the film winds desultorily toward their eventual capture. Liberation transforms the couple into pleasure-seeking lovers on the lam. In this sense, the film’s second, looser act gestures at the freewheeling future of filmmaking and the dismantling of the studio system’s moral framework by the arrival of the New Hollywood and films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
Too bad this dimension remains largely theoretical, as with the film’s emotional upheavals. When Jake, for instance, is revealed to be one of Ida’s lovers in her past life, during a nocturnal showdown in Niagara Falls, the moment, for all the screaming and gunfire, unfolds listlessly. Likewise in the film’s most intentionally disturbing scene: When a dirty cop pulls them over and assaults Ida while patting her down, her eventual grisly retaliation—which ends in her biting his tongue out of his mouth—is a contrived means of signaling her burgeoning monstrosity and unapologetic lack of remorse.
This awkward, indifferent tone plagues the film’s most pivotal scenes, making The Bride! feel more like a collection of strange, sometimes amusing scenarios than a cohesive narrative with real dramatic weight. Buckley and Bale’s chemistry has the appeal of a wet blanket, and explains what, in my mind, is the film’s greatest missed opportunity: to build out and complicate the parallels between creating an artificial being and engineering your own partner in a world of gendered expectations. Despite Ida’s assertions of autonomy, she was born of Frank’s yearning, her past replaced by Frank’s invented stories of their shared history. He is essentially gaslighting her throughout the entire film. This feels more conspicuous precisely because we never really buy their love story—it’s drowned out, diminished, by the film’s many moving parts.
The Bride! is baggy, baffling, and erratically conceived, yet even as I bemoaned its inadequacies, I was also fascinated by them and by Gyllenhaal’s steadfast commitment to the concept, her choices clearly born of the desire to experiment. With its niche references and bizarre, if also intriguingly discordant, genre shifts, it’s a unicorn among other expensive studio offerings (it reportedly had a budget of $90 million). Ambition, funnily enough, can be perceived as a monstrous trait for women in particular; though being difficult to love, the film contends, may very well be a virtue.