The Bride! movie review: Christian Bale, Jessie Buckley film is brilliant, only in flashes | Movie-review News
4 min readMar 6, 2026 07:37 PM IST The Bride! movie review: “I’m revolting,” says Ida/Penny/The Bride/Mary Shelley in The Bride!. “Oh, no!” exclaims Frank/Frankenstein. “Relax,” says she, or means it anyway. “I am revolting as in mutiny.” Just in case you didn’t get it – and there is little chance of that. From exposition of scientific terms regarding how dead persons are brought alive again, as in Frankenstein and Ida, to exposition on how this is actually a feminist treatise, in the garb of a horror/romance, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! doesn’t believe in leaving anything unsaid. So it is that Ida (Buckley) at a crucial juncture says “Me Too” once and, then, once more. So it is that Dr Euphronius (Bening) underlines that she must keep her first name hidden to get published. So it is that Frank (Bale) revels in Ida’s refusal to be anybody’s wife. And so it is that the detective who cracks the case, Mallow (Cruz), outwits the others because nobody notices the woman officer in the room. Not that …






