The Bride!

3 outta 5

The Bride! earns bonus points for being incredibly weird. Like so weird at times it gets a bit off putting and incomprehensible as the leads spend a lot of it yelling in undead rage every few minutes. But they’re both interesting actors and more compelling than the various competing subplots and characters that don’t add much. But this film gets a pass for being just turned up to 11 for the whole time, although it may be a bit too much for viewers. And considering how it tanked at the box office, it was a bit too much. And also considering this comes months after the very excellent Frankenstein, The Bride! seems lesser than that film. 

In the 1930s, Ida (Jessie Buckley) is a rambunctious woman who gets herself killed when smack-talking a group of gangsters. At the same time, arriving in the city is Frank (Christian Bale), the monster made 100 years ago by Victor Frankenstein. Frank finds Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Benning) and asks her to make him a Bride, a cure for his desperate decades of loneliness. They find Ida’s corpse and bring her back to life and she starts to fall for Frank. While they live their lives together and kill a bunch of bad guys, they attract the attention of the gangsters who killed Ida. Also following them is a detective, Jake (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant Malloy (Penélope Cruz) that may mean the end for these undead lovebirds.

Comparing this film constantly to 2025’s Frankenstein is a bit unfair but can’t be helped. Something like the resurrection in Frankenstein is an elaborate piece of the film that the 1st act hinges on. In The Bride!,it just sort of happens. Benning’s doctor gets in a few funny lines when she is telling Frank about how absurd it is that she has to make him a mate. There’s a couple of revelations about her past that aren’t as interesting as the film wants it to be. The movie has a few too many superfluous side characters. The cutaways to gangsters being evil seem unnecessary. The detective has a history with Ida that seems like filler. As fun as Penélope Cruz is to watch, the back and forth she has with Detective Jake, and everything with the detective seems like something out of a different movie.  Even though the movie is set in the 1930s, it never gets a noir vibe. Probably the most pointless plot is how The Bride is inspiring revolution in the female population. Nothing comes out of it aside from some folks putting on makeup like the Bride and burning cars.

Bale and Buckley are the best thing about this. Bale as Frank is both menacing and also really pathetic, and his vocal performance sounds all kinds of crazy. There is a bit where he is inspired by seeing a movie star and when he meets his hero, it all goes wrong when the movie star dismisses him. Sometimes Buckley’s Bride keeps spewing gibberish that it is difficult to understand. But that’s kind of the point; she’s not put together right, but she fits with Frank. The first time she tries to get intimate with Frank, he pushes her away with a polite but firm, “No thank you.” She is disappointed and says she was “Just trying to be friendly.” 

Whenever they act like bona fide movie monsters is when the movie picks up. The Bride taking a guy out by ripping out his tongue, or when Frank curb stomps some guy who was hassling them. As the movie is very much Bonnie and Clyde inspired, the finale is appropriately bloody. The stranger it gets, the better it is, like how Frankenstein author Mary Shelly herself (Buckley, again) from beyond the grave inserts herself as a narrator in the story and often berates the Bride. This movie may juggle a bit too many tones and plots to be a comprehensive experience, but whenever it just acts wacky, The Bride! has a great vibe.