Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
At one point in the tumbling cavalcade that is The Bride!, Jessie Buckley's once-dead, now-revitalized character pauses during one of her many conversations with Frankenstein's monster (Christian Bale) and says, "What's my name?" Her delivery is even and direct—the character has amnesia about her previous existence and is genuinely curious—but, as is so often the case with Buckley, the words carry an almost palpable emotional force. This is a performance that stays in an expressionistic realm for much of the film's duration, but Buckley has such a direct line to realness (you have to excuse me, I can't think of a better word) that somehow this madcap movie stays, against all odds, grounded.
The moment also goes to writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal's purpose here, insofar as a single purpose can be found in this pinwheeling film: Who gets to define a woman, who gets to name her? As the story opens, Buckley's character is named Ida, acting up as a gangster's moll in 1930s Chicago and kicked to her death in a fit of violence. The lonely Frankenstein's monster, called Frank, dubs her Penelope, after she is resuscitated by a certain Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening). Penny and Frank would seem to be fated in their love, but even here the bride will have her own way. Her "creator," the author Mary Shelley (also played by Buckley in a black-and-white bardo of some kind), can't control the willful, shockheaded creature either.
The Bride! careens from this premise through a series of outrageous scenes, including Frank's fondness for a movie-musical star (Jake Gyllenhaal), an investigation by a Chicago cop (Peter Sarsgaard) and his secretary (Penelope Cruz), and our stitched-up couple's Bonnie and Clyde spree. We might also mention that in this circus, Buckley and a quite splendid Bale manage to carve out a tender love story.
Allusions to Mel Brooks and Herman Melville begin to seem quite normal within this rippling canvas. Embedded in the movie's glorious fun is Maggie Gyllenhaal's embrace of wild ideas and narrative eruptions. The Bride! plays like a battlefield collaboration from Samuel Fuller and Jean-Luc Godard: hectoring, radicalized, in your face. The people who write (and obey) those screenwriting books that prescribe the rigid blueprinting of story will despair at this film's existence. Thank you for that, Maggie Gyllenhaal.
I saw the movie a few days after it opened, and although I don't read reviews before I see a film, I got the gist: The Bride! was a mess, and the consensus was disapproving or bewildered. It is messy, that is true; it signals as much by mashing together anachronistic elements. Gyllenhaal grew up in a showbiz family and has directed before, yet there are moments that are almost exuberantly amateurish. Or amateurishly exuberant? Or is it just that Gyllenhaal decided that if her point is that the world has harmed women by doing things a certain way, maybe her movie on the subject should be done in a different way? Such an approach bespeaks revolution. Something along the lines of "Brain Attack," the movement inspired by the Bride's brazen behavior. If Brain Attack is a credo, count me in, and add a toast: To a new world of goddesses and monsters!
March 13, 2026
