Trigger Warning: The Bride! incorporates several instances of violence against women that may be triggering for individuals who’ve experienced sexual assault. Additionally, there’s a scene in a club that utilizes flashing lights which may induce a reaction for those with photosensitivity.
“It’s been said the world’s a stage
And everyone must play their part
Well, if that’s true, I’ll act
With all my heart
I’ll take my cue to go
Stand ‘neath the spotlight’s glow
And give them one hell of a show.”– “Give Them a Show” from horror musical comedy Anna and the Apocalypse.
Life is a series of contradictions. Sometimes these are naturally occurring, sometimes they are constructed of the consequences of our actions, but, mostly, they are by malicious and conscious design. For instance, the disdain for a culture is frequently propagated by media consumption that holds up existing tropes or creates new ones, creating an entire cycle that feeds and regurgitates the same misogynistic and/or xenophobic bile over and again. Tackling such themes is filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal’s latest project, the sci-fi horror comedy The Bride!, which borrows from truth and fiction to craft a parable about being marked a monster by those from whom have harmed you when you take control back from them. In its home release edition, those who crave a chance to learn more about the making of the film and the filmmakers’ intentions can do so through four illuminating featurettes.
On a night out, tragedy befalls Ida (Jessie Buckley) when she tumbles down a set of stairs amid an argument, breaking her neck and several bones. Around the same time, Frankenstein (Christian Bale) arrives in Chicago to meet Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) in hopes that the specialist in revival sciences might help create a mate for him to cure his loneliness. Having her corpse unburied and reanimated, Ida (who has forgotten her name) is told that she is the bride of Frankenstein upon waking but doesn’t initially accept it. Thus begins a courtship as the pair get to know one another, but when an assault attempt upon his bride leads Frankenstein to murder, the two go on the run. Regardless of where they go, her question of identity doggedly pursues them wherever they travel.
The following home release review is based on a 4K UHD retail copy provided by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
From start to finish, The Bride! explores the violence done unto women. Written by Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter), the tale uses a fever dream-like structure for the bulk of the film in which Frankenstein is real and his imagination occasionally integrates with the world of the characters. But it’s not *his* story that serves as the framing, even if it’s the reason Ida is reanimated. (Though we will come back to this.) Instead, Gyllenhaal uses Shelley herself as the way into the story, opening the film with the author (also played by Buckley) shrouded in black, her figure shot in monochrome, who speaks with great frustration about how she’s known for two things: having written Frankenstein and her relationship to Percy. In the views of this Mary, she is perpetually defined by her relationship to men (even one of her own making), with the rest of her works ignored. Then, this Mary addresses the brain cancer that killed her, citing it as the reason she never got to finish a planned story, and that, through the afterlife, she will be possessing someone. This is the scaffold of The Bride! which gives it the phantasmagorical sensation that courses through it as Mary partially takes over Ida just before her demise and resides within her upon reanimation, giving The Bride an outward visage of someone with a split personality or, as happens with individuals dealing with a brain illness/injury, less inhibited speech or action. Using the Mary-within-Ida construct, Gyllenhaal creates a different version of a self-insert common in storytelling because Mary is literally within the story itself, not necessarily pulling the strings so much as influencing Ida’s journey from the moment of possession. This singular choice, while interesting as a means of making external The Bride’s internal struggle to understand herself post-reanimation, is itself a manipulation, one in a series of them, that reduces The Bride and removes agency. Perhaps this is the point, but one struggles to view Mary as a liberator when she comes off as the very white ally for whom so many tropes are designed.
All the men in the film are presented as violent, greedy, and/or selfish. Set in 1930s Chicago at the start, this is pre-World War II when women were asked to step into men’s roles as the draft occurred and well-before the Civil Rights Movement which benefitted minorities and women, as well as the second wave feminism that occurred in the 1960s/1970s. In this period (one which some would like to return to), women were property — if not of their father’s, then to their partner’s or male sibling’s. They were to be traded; their value strictly based on what they could give (financially, sexually, maternally), rather than what they could do as people. In this cinematic world, these notions of gender nonobjectivity are somewhat amplified, but not so much as to appear implausible. Living or undead, Ida/The Bride is told what she likes and dislikes at near every turn with her agency reduced when a man feels like they are in the right to take from her. Frankenstein is the least monstrous among them as he doesn’t push, doesn’t get jealous, and doesn’t claim her as his until she appears comfortable for such a declaration; however, he is still violent to those who might harm her and his greatest violence upon her is that he doesn’t tell her that she died, opting to instead fabricate her past upon being asked. We may applaud his ability to curb stomp attempted rapists, but we should not permit his falsehoods to go under questioned via the guise of romance because, well-intentioned as someone may be to protect someone from the knowledge of their death, the continuance of fabrication places his needs above her’s and each lie is another metaphorical breach of trust that reduces her agency as the tales he spins seek to mold her (intentionally or not) into a version that is palatable to him versus an acceptance of her as she is.
There is one thing that’s not a contradiction and that’s the persistent message of men as perpetrators of violence upon women and the need for women to say “enough,” from Frankenstein’s “well-intentioned” sin of omission to the Chicago detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) who relies on a female assistant (Penélope Cruz’s Myrna Malloy) to do everything while continuously blocking her advancement to the general men who try to take from women what they think is theirs to possess to a crime boss (Zlatko Burić) with a connection to Ida. The brow-beating repetition of the film often seems like overkill, except we continue to live in a period in which Harvey Weinstein is still being interviewed and the Epstein Files, even with metric tons of information and public victim statements known for decades, continue to be explored online mostly by women, continue to be mostly withheld and without a single American-based arrest. Gyllenhaal oscillates between gentle nods and the total absence of subtlety in order to make her point. Of the more subtle pieces of commentary, the one that stands out the most is the inclusion of filmmaker Victor Halperin’s 1932 White Zombie, a film credited with the first use of “zombie” in American cinema, which utilizes racist tropes regarding Haitian culture and features a white women coming under the control of a Voodou practitioner (thereby removing her agency while also supporting the fearmongering notion of “Black men coming for white women”). Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein is a cinephile for one specific fictitious actor and so the reanimated pair frequently attend films, but it’s The Bride who chooses White Zombie and it’s there that an incident occurs mid-in-movie film wherein the audience (in-film and out) is challenged to identify where the real horror exists.
Unfortunately, this isn’t mentioned within any of the four featurettes included in the home edition. Through four featurettes averaging eight-minutes, the audience is guided through everything from how Gyllenhaal, Buckley, and Bale viewed their characters (and each other’s), how the looks for the central duo made the most out of each detail to convey secrets about themselves, the production design that sought to communicate the 1930s by way of 1981 by way of the present, and even a celebratory segment focused entirely on the supporting ensemble members (“The Bride! Party”). Each one is a mixture of on-set footage, behind-the-scenes footage, a formal interview with the central three (Gyllenhaal, Buckley, and Bale) on a fancy set, and/or cast, crew, producers against a simple black background. But this is where the similarities end as each one covers different ground with no overlap in conversation. In “Stitching Together The Bride!,” Gyllenhaal says her film asks “what if Shelley didn’t get out everything she wanted to in her original novel?”. Much has been made of Bale’s daily primal scream on set in order to try to attain Frank’s raspiness, but, within “Designing the Look,” we learn how that turned into a communal moment for anyone in the cast and crew who wanted to jump in once he was done with makeup. In “The Muse and the Reimagined Monster,” Gyllenhaal expresses how she didn’t write for anyone specifically when drafting the script, yet couldn’t imagine anyone other than Buckley in the role. These are but a few aspects covered within the four featurettes.
This being a home release review, it’s at least worth mentioning some of the technical aspects. The official press release from WBHE doesn’t identify what type of disc is used, but the DVD reportedly uses Dolby Digital for sound, while the 4K UHD and Blu-ray offers Atmos True HD and Dolby Digital. In terms of the bitrate for the 4K UHD edition, this hovers in the 70 Mbps range with dips into 60s and jumps to 80s. This seems fairly standard for most WBHE 4K UHDs, even with the occasional falls into the 40s and 60s, such as during the initial scene between Frank and Euphronius. There’re no obvious or visible indications of bitrate changes when watching the film, no degradations or artifacting (which is particularly important given the heavy use of blacks or nighttime sequences). The disc does capture the intended vibrancy of the clothes, such as The Bride’s orange dress which grows rattier as the story goes on, and the way in which darkness is enveloping to the two central figures, a place for them to truly be themselves when the light of day feels exposing. It is frustrating, however, that the bitrate should be so low when a proper 4K UHD disc with plenty of room for the film should be in the 90s or higher.
One thing is absolutely clear: even if one doesn’t fully understand her vision, Gyllenhaal is being intentional. Her messaging, her examples, and the structure of the film may appear mad-cap and slap-dash, however it’s far more premediated — the costumes, the creature makeup for the anonymous Bride that reimagines The Bride’s typical black and white look, the violence, and the layering of fact and fiction. But the film is still mired in contradictions, to which I look to Speed Levitch who said, “… But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion …” And that’s the best way to view a film that’s about as polarizing to audiences and critics as Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022). Watch it and take it dancing. Grapple with it. Buy it a drink and ask why the overt nature may bother you. Put on your listening ears and hear it speak to you. Sit with the discomfort of the contradictions and ask yourself why they exist at all.
The Bride! 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and digital Special Features:
- Stitching Together The Bride! (8:17)
- Designing the Look (8:49)
- The Muse and the Reimagined Monster (8:09)
- The Bride! Party (6:18)
Available on digital April 7th, 2026.
Available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD May 19th, 2026.
For more information, head to the official Warner Bros. Pictures The Bride! webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: Home Video, Reviews, streaming
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