The Bride! is a new horror film from actress-turned-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose debut feature film The Lost Daughter was met with terrific reviews. The Bride!, which Gyllenhaal also wrote, is proving far more divisive. At time of writing, the punk rock horror romance has a 60% score on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it “fresh,” albeit only just.
The Bride! stars Jessie Buckley (who’s getting a lot of Oscar buzz for her performance in Hamnet) as a woman who is killed in Chicago in the 1930s only to be brought back from the dead to be a companion for Frankenstein’s monster, known here as Frank ( Christian Bale). Together, they go on a Bonnie and Clyde-esque rampage, with the Bride inciting a feminist revolution throughout the country. Annette Bening, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal also star.
Pretty much everyone agrees that this movie takes a lot of big swings, but there’s a lot of disagreement over whether they connect. There are some critics who endorse it wholeheartedly, like Meagan Navarro of Bloody Disgusting, who calls the movie “a bold, wildly imaginative reclamation of the classic Universal Monster character.”
There are also critics who utterly hated what they saw done to Mary Shelley’s sci-fi horror classic, like Kevin Maher of The Times, who calls the movie “a howling misfire.” Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post simply calls The Bride! “[o]ne of the absolute worst movies I have had the displeasure of watching in this job.”
Warner Bros.
However, as revealed by the score itself, most critics fall somewhere in the middle. A lot of them want to give the cast and crew credit for taking risks, mixing genres, and being artistically daring at a time when so many Hollywood movies feel like cookie-cutter creations. But they also acknowledge that not all the elements gel. That’s the tack taken by MovieWeb’s own Mark Keizer. He calls The Bride! “a gorgeous, full-throttle, never-boring Frankenstein’s monster of a movie that nearly flies apart at the seams.”
There are a lot of reviews in that range, with some critics feeling like the audacity of The Bride! is so compelling that it outweighs the messiness (“While imperfections exist in the violent, genre-defying romance, they don’t dim Gyllenhaal’s clear-eyed passion, grand ideas and big swings spattered on the screen,” writes Brian Truitt of USA Today) and others who think the movie is too chaotic and ungainly to be worth the price of admission, even if it is admirably daring (“There’s a playfulness there, and a real burst of imaginative thinking, but Gyllenhaal has regrettably pulled a Frankenstein herself,” writes Clarisse Loughrey of the Independent. “All those ideas, yet they haven’t quite stitched up together to make a beautiful corpse).
At the least, it doesn’t sound like The Bride! is dull. If you’re in the mood for something experimental, you may walk out of the theater with a new favorite film…or you’ll want your two hours and six minutes back. It feels like anything could happen after The Bride! opens in theaters this Friday, March 6.
Release Date
March 6, 2026
Runtime
126 Minutes
Producers
Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Osnat Handelsman-Keren, Talia Kleinhendler, Maggie Gyllenhaal
