In partnership with Warner Bros. UK
Here comes THE BRIDE!. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second film as writer-director, following 2021’s Oscar-nominated psychological thriller The Lost Daughter, is an iconoclastic passion project that puts a radical new spin on a horror classic. Gyllenhaal’s M.O. was to explore a beloved and culturally iconic character, The Bride, but with more agency and complexity than she’s ever had before.
This punk rock romp draws inspiration from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and James Whale’s 1935 film Bride Of Frankenstein, but completely flips the premise. Jessie Buckley takes centre stage as the titular Bride, a slain young woman who’s brought back to life as a companion for Christian Bale‘s haunted, harrowingly lonely Frank.
What happens next is pure chaos: murder, romance and a transgressive cultural movement, all topped off with surreal and magical elements filmed in IMAX. With THE BRIDE!, Gyllenhaal is really drilling down into the innate monstrousness present in all of us. Here’s the lowdown on this year’s most thrilling film.
It features a movie icon as you’ve never seen her before
Or, for that matter, heard her. In Whale’s film, the Bride played by Elsa Lanchester only appears for a few minutes and has no dialogue. To bring the story bang into 2026, Gyllenhaal hit on the ingenious idea to reimagine it with The Bride as the emotional and narrative focal point.
“We get to see a little bit of who she was before she’s brought back to life as The Bride,” Gyllenhaal told Entertainment Weekly. “In a way, everything about the movie has an extreme mythological quality. She’s almost every woman in a way. Before she’s brought back, you watch her deal with a lot of shit. And she puts up with it, but she comes back with a very strong need to express herself.”
Because the role is so multifaceted – “it’s many parts in one,” Gyllenhaal explained – she turned to a wildly talented performer she has worked with before: Buckley, who earned a BAFTA for her stunning turn in Hamnet. “I needed an actress who was deeply feeling, both powerful and very vulnerable, both irrational and incredibly intelligent in her body, and compelling to me,” Gyllenhaal told EW.
It’s punk rock to its core
At a recent press conference for THE BRIDE!, Gyllenhaal described her movie as “totally punk” because it’s a celebration of “something that doesn’t fit easily into a box”. Asked to name a punk song that she really connects with the film, she picked Siouxsie And The Banshees‘ cover of Iggy Pop‘s ‘The Passenger’. Gyllenhaal noted that while we might think of The Bride as a “passenger” in Frankenstein’s journey, in this film, she’s very much “driving the story”. Which is super-punk in itself.
On a granular level, punk also informs many of the film’s aesthetic choices. Soon after Gyllenhaal cast Bale as Frank, he began sending her images and videos of Sex Pistols legend Sid Vicious, something which informs his character’s wardrobe and relationship with Buckley’s Bride. They’re almost a Gothic Sid and Nancy.
It gives us a new vision of New York City
Gyllenhaal has made THE BRIDE! even more breathtaking by setting it in a gangster-ridden but deliberately anachronistic rendering of the Big Apple. “I love the 1930s aesthetically because the movies from that era are about fantasy love, fantasy looks, fantasy everything,” she said at the press conference. “But it’s also important to say that my version of the 1930s is different. It’s the 1930s by way of downtown New York [in] 1981 and now.”
In fact, Gyllenhaal filmed in almost every borough of New York City with a particular focus on avant-garde architectural design. Meanwhile, production designer Karen Murphy took inspiration from French architecture when creating various set pieces including the film’s incredibly striking lab and ballroom sequences.
Gyllenhaal’s stylistic references were a similarly idiosyncratic mix. At the press conference, she singled out Arthur Penn’s classic 1967 crime caper Bonnie And Clyde, Terrence Malick’s revered neo-noir Badlands and Fritz Lang’s visionary sci-fi film Metropolis. She also selected a cherished cult classic by the late David Lynch. “I was interested in subverting a classic movie style,” she said. “I think about a movie like Wild At Heart that does subvert those classic movie things in a David Lynch way, [but that] is different than my way.”
It’s got a cast to die for
In fact, Gyllenhaal’s ensemble is so gleaming, it could almost have been assembled in a lab. Joining Buckley and Bale are Oscar winner Penélope Cruz, Hollywood great Annette Bening and chameleonic character actor Peter Sarsgaard.
Oh, and her superstar brother Jake Gyllenhaal also has a supporting role, which Maggie described as the “icing on the cake”. It’s only a tiny spoiler to reveal that he sings, dances and, according to big sis, “wears a great tuxedo”. Honestly, we’re obsessed already.