The Bride! (2026)
We wanted to see this already notorious instant disaster before it slipped out of theaters and was buried in the final vault for Warner Bros. movies....HBO-Max (or eventually Paramount after it gobbles up what's left of WB). Sorry, we don't subscribe to either service......
And we had a more than sneaking suspicion that this film would not justify forking out 24.99 for a Blu-Ray.
We weren't quite right about that. But we're not sorry we splurged for a bargain matinee 7.00 ticket to see it on the big screen in ear-busting stereo......along with two other people who came to see it.
So here's the rundown....
Yes, it's a sloppy, unhinged mess from beginning to end.
Yes, it's deliberately crafted as a frenzied, fantasy fever-dream that never slows down, catches its breath or ever figures out what story it wants to tell at any given moment......
Yes, the high pitched craziness drags on and on through a punishing two hours......and like every film released in the last 10 years, it could've benefited from being.....well, damn shorter than 126 minutes. That's an awful lot of time to make an audience sit through a film that makes you think you're trapped inside the violent ward of a psychiatric hospital. (Just ask the makers of 'Joker: Folie a Deux'.)
Nothing in writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal's brief directorial career suggested her capable of attempting such an ambitiously off-the-rails visual three ring circus, a chaotic nightmare that flies its freak flag like its going to war. To her (and Warner Brothers) deep regret, she discovered.....it ain't easy.
But damn, we couldn't help admiring her sheer nerve for trying, aided and abetted by one of the most fiercely talented actresses at work today....and in this film, not only working at the very peak of her talents, but if anything, expanding her range.
Jessie Buckley, who plays both Frankenstein's bride and her creator Mary Shelley, dazzles like a special effect all by herself. Her explosive, mesmerizing performance here far eclipses the work of the usual 1000 digital artists whose names drag through the usual 10 minute end credit crawls.
Unlike other critics, we didn't have any problem with Maggie Gyllenhaal turning the film into a battle cry for female empowerment. The sequence where the Bride inspires the women of 1930's Chicago to copy her ink-stained make-up and embark on a literal man-bashing spree provided one of the few times this addled film made sense to us....(not to mention adding a helping of sly satire.)
And it's no wonder that the only thing that stood out for the few viewers who took a chance on the film was its exhilarating, bonkers 'Puttin' On The Ritz' musical number, a live wire homage to both Mel Brooks' 'Young Frankenstein' and Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video. It's a moment of enthusiastic, creative joy that Gyllenhaal briefly captures before she lets the film melt back into its quagmire of dank weirdness that wore everybody out.
Ultimately, 'The Bride!' sinks under the weight of all the many tropes it tries to juggle in the air at the same time......gangsters as a metaphor for the patriarchy, movie glamour vs. cruel reality, an Addams Family version of 'Bonnie and Clyde' and the primal scream of anguish from a woman brought back from the dead only for the purpose of an arranged marriage.
In its own ways, we thought the film as every bit as daring and adventurous as anything in 'One Battle After Another' and 'Sinners'. But 'The Bride' and its lead character weren't designed as crowd pleasers. Quite the opposite. Jessie Buckley's bride dared you to watch her.....and the audience passed on the dare.
(We don't want to end this review without at least mentioning the equally gifted, superb work of Christian Bale as the poor, dense, perplexed Frankenstein and Annette Benning as the not-quite-mad doctor he tasks with jump-starting a mate for him...)
We'll go out on a limb to predict this much.....it may take ten or twenty years, but we'd take a bet that this film will undergo a major critical re-assessment, maybe even a rediscovery. But we wouldn't gamble on whether all those years later, it'll still be reviled as a catastrophe or celebrated as a forgotten, misunderstood classic. You tell us.
In the here and now, we say 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2). If you come across it on HBO or Paramount (or whatever the hell they end up calling themselves)....c'mon, throw caution to the wind and give it a shot.
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