Back in early 2007, in the midst of his awards campaign for his supporting performance in Dreamgirls, Eddie Murphy released Norbit, so immediately critically reviled that many have suggested that it torpedoed his chance for an Oscar in an entirely separate film. Now, in 2026, Jessie Buckley has taken the same sort of risk with The Bride. I don’t think her agonisingly bad turn as the Bride of Frankenstein will actually stop her from claiming gold for Hamnet on the night – she’s too much of a shoo-in and The Bride is releasing very late in the voting cycle – but it really should. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Suicide Squad-ified take on the Frankenstein mythos is an atrocity, an early but mightily strong contender for 2026’s worst film.
Moving the corpse-reanimating action to 1930s Chicago, the warning signs appear early in The Bride when we first see Buckley – in an interlude that feels like the most insufferable show at the Edinburgh Fringe was suddenly given a studio budget – appear as the ghost of Mary Shelley herself. She addresses us directly before going into the world of the film (in which the experiments of Victor Frankenstein 100 years ago are both real and relatively common knowledge) and possessing a woman called Ida (also Buckley), who will soon be murdered by gangsters and dug up and reanimated as The Bride.
Already far too mannered and precious a premise, the real disaster of this choice is that Ida and Shelley share a headspace, Buckley mostly possessing the accent and mannerisms of a Chicago gangster’s moll but frequently launching into an upper crust British voice that can’t help but yell out literary synonyms for the words she’s hearing or speaking like a thesaurus with Tourette’s. It is unspeakably irritating, an idea that should’ve been scrapped at draft one of the script, but Gyllenhaal and Buckley commit full bore to it for the entire two-hour runtime.
As the OG Frankenstein’s monster, Christian Bale doesn’t really fare any better, playing ‘Frank’ with a mix of simian grunting and shrill fanboy obsessiveness that never gels with the lonely, violent, tragic figure we’re told he *should* be as he and The Bride careen around America like a Joker and Harley-style version of Bonnie and Clyde. It’s a tonal problem that is everywhere in The Bride, Gyllenhaal trying to Say Something about sexual abuse and misogynistic oppression while also running her story and its characters on Beetlejuice logic, where being wacky is always priority number one and every person in every scene is a freak.
The whole supporting cast, from Annette Bening as mad scientist Doctor Euphronious to Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as a bafflingly unconvincing detective duo to Jake Gyllenhaal as a Fred Astaire-type Hollywood star, is completely underwritten, while the organised crime subplots bubbling in the background never rise above the station of ‘pointless’. The Bride apparently had a rather troubled production, and that’s very visible in the final product, whether it’s the completely out of control performances or the often downright incompetent editing, the biggest victim of which is a mass hysteria dance sequence that is interesting on paper and painful in practice.
Aside from a few Weimar Germany-inspired designs, I don’t think there’s a single choice in The Bride that worked for me (have you ever wanted to see a sequence in which Frankenstein’s monster gets tattoos? me neither). It may be less offensive depending on your tolerance for stagy self-satisfaction, but I can’t imagine every really getting much out of a story this deliberately insufferable (not to mention one that has basically been done much, much better very recently with Poor Things). With a nine-figure budget and an entirely unique style, The Bride should be the sort of big swing I can’t help but support, but this swing hasn’t just missed the ball – the bat has flown out of the batter’s hands and killed a fan in the stands. A disaster.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 