Maggie Gyllenhaal’s debut directorial film The Lost Daughter holds a special place in my heart. The first film I ever wrote about for Cinephile Corner, and it remains one of my favorite movies of 2021. A straight-to-Netflix film that at the time felt out of place for a streamer that typically wouldn’t champion something like it on the awards circuit, but one that broke through nonetheless. Gyllenhaal announced herself as a filmmaker with real restraint and emotional intelligence, and I’ve been curious where she’d go next ever since.
Well, she has capitalized on the critical success of The Lost Daughter by way of a reimagined Bride of Frankenstein, one that promised to be more transgressive and polarizing than nearly any Frankenstein-adjacent material in a while, and certainly more rowdy than Guillermo del Toro’s snoozer of a Frankenstein adaptation last year. The production for The Bride! was troubled to say the least. Numerous delays mixed with leaks suggesting the final product was something of a lost mess. The film’s journey from Netflix to Warner Bros., with reported disagreements over filming locations and costs likely exceeding $100 million all in, did little to inspire confidence going in. And for what it’s worth, a Bride of Frankenstein re-adaptation isn’t exactly where I’d expect Gyllenhaal to go after The Lost Daughter, given the restraint and emotional complexity that film concerns itself with. But hey, I’m all for big swings.
And that’s precisely what the more charitable writing about The Bride! has centered on, that Gyllenhaal tries a lot here, and that the central concept and stylization behind it is a big swing by itself. Set in 1930s Chicago, the film follows Frank (Christian Bale) and the resurrected Ida, known only as the Bride (Jessie Buckley), as they commit crime together out of a shared sense of being ostracized from a society already rotten with corruption. It’s a modern female-led noir with a Bonnie and Clyde-like A-plot at its core, and the stars are buying in just as much as Gyllenhaal is. Especially Buckley, who plays the Bride with real heft and presence, and Bale, who does what Bale does when he’s locked in. On paper, this is a film loaded with talent.
Ultimately, though, there’s not much juice to anything actually going on here. The Bride! is a limp crime noir that feels like everyone gave up somewhere in post-production, as if they couldn’t delay the film any longer and collectively decided to abandon the project on the editing room floor. There are a lot of loose ends, characters, and plot threads given nowhere near enough time to make you care about any of them. Jake Gyllenhaal’s supporting turn as Ronnie Reed, Frank’s favorite on-screen actor, feels half-formed. John Magaro and Matthew Maher, as lowly mobster henchmen, barely register. Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz as the detectives tailing Frank and the Bride are similarly underserved. The film spends so much of its 126-minute runtime on extended montage sequences of Buckley and Bale committing crimes together that it stretches itself too thin to give anything else enough room to breathe, let alone land.
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I admire the big swing, like so many others have already noted in their own coverage. But when the big swing is this much of a miss, I’m not going to pretend I liked this more than I actually did. The Bride! has fleeting moments of interesting ideas, and it is not short on visual style, shot with the kind of scope that makes individual frames worth looking at even when the story underneath them isn’t working. But it’s a movie with a great trailer and not a great full-length final cut. And to be honest, I’m not sure there was ever a version where the final cut was going to be much better. The troubled production tells on itself throughout, and what we’re left with feels less like a completed film than an expensive proof of concept for something that never quite came together.
Score: 4/10
The Bride! (2026)
- Cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Jeannie Berlin, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz, Zlatko Burić, Louis Cancelmi, Julianne Hough, Matthew Maher
- Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
- Genre: Horror, Science Fiction
- Runtime: 126 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: March 6, 2026
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