Here Comes the Idea

Looking for feminism in Frankenstein is kind of like looking for romance in Alice in Wonderland. People really want it to be there and, if they look hard enough, they can find some compelling clues to suggest that it is there, and sometimes they go off and make analyses or adaptations that tease out these hints that turn out, in retrospect, to be largely projections originating from the analyst than anything the original author was probably ever interested in. Maggie Gyllenhaal's 2026 film The Bride! is at least among the more self-aware of those riffs and, in particular, fans of James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein may at least sympathise with Gyllenhaal's passion for that 1935 film. The Bride! is a very postmodern, academic film loaded with a modern political perspective, honestly more akin to Angela Carter than Mary Shelley. The performances and production design make it a delightful ride and I at least enjoyed it a little more than the similarly self-aware Frankenstein pastiche, Poor Things. Jessie Buckley is in the duel role of Mary Shelley and the reanimated Bride and she plays both like a narcissistic, theatrical actress, like Patti LuPone or Norma Desmond, someone at all times palpably enraptured by her own grandeur. Her playing both roles is one of the more obvious nods to Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale's cinematic sequel to his famous adaptation of Frankenstein, both films starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the Bride in Bride of Frankenstein and she is mesmerising. I certainly don't blame Maggie Gyllenhaal for wanting to build a whole movie around that performance. It made me a lifelong Elsa Lanchester fan and for years I sought out every movie with Lanchester I could get my hands on. It's a different kind of performance than Jessie Buckley delivers, though. While Buckley presents us with a woman captivated by the tragedy of her own unrecognised genius, Lanchester's performance as Mary Shelley is of a self-possessed, subtly perverse woman, amused at an unspoken joke while her performance as the Bride is like that of a terrified animal. Buckley's performance is fun but in a way less connected to her environment and story. Some reviewers compare her to Deadpool and I think that's valid.

It's not only Bride of Frankenstein that Gyllenhaal references. There are scads of references to cinema of the '20s and '30s stitched throughout the movie that I suspect will drastically lower any appreciation the uninitiated will feel for the movie but I could appreciate Buckley's impression of Marlene Dietrich or Jake Gyllenhaal's performance as a Fred Astaire-ish musical star.

The monster is played by Christian Bale with a sense of unwavering sincerity and devotion to his goal. At first he seemed like Maggie Gyllenhaal meant for him to come off as an obnoxious incel, someone who believed he deserved to have everyone bend over backward to satisfy his unrequited needs. But once he meets the Bride he becomes a humble white knight. One of the more distinctly modern pieces of messaging in the film is of the subjectivity of beauty and the injustice of beauty standards, a thread that comes to a head when Bale's monster performs a musical routine referencing Peter Boyle's performance in Young Frankenstein that seems to suggest the audience is the monster for having laughed at Peter Boyle.

Bale's monster is referred to as Frankenstein, Frank for short, by the way, both a nod to the fact that the monster's name and the scientist's are frequently confused as well as the idea that the monster is, in fact, Victor Frankenstein's son so, therefore, he'd naturally carry on the family name.

Frank and the Bride hit the road as the film becomes an extended riff on Bonnie and Clyde which many reviewers have compared to other Bonnie and Clyde pastiches like Natural Born Killers and especially Joker: Folie a Deux. Frank and the Bride are wrapped up in their own worlds, a bubble that's occasionally punctured when one of the simplistic, vicious denizens of our world attempts to kill or rape them. The great failing of this film for many who've viewed it is the lack of a credible world for these two characters to dwell in. They are invariably victims of a broadly villainous world whereas other riffs on the Bonnie and Clyde story at least devote some time to the idea that the self-absorption of the protagonists may do legitimate harm to innocent bystanders. This is is something Mary Shelley herself better understood than both Maggie Gyllenhaal and Guillermo del Toro. Shelley's original monster is by no means a saint.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's fundamental idea is to find the feminism of Frankenstein by taking its depiction of monstrousness as an allegory for the roles women are forced to play in society. But it's ultimately unsatisfying, as allegories often are, because the two things don't map comfortably onto each other. Mary Shelley was more interested in the sanity of self-creation versus the imposition of life. Her interest in this idea was held without obligation to sort characters into consistently moral or immoral figures. Ultimately, that makes her work a more sophisticated rumination on the human experience on a level most adaptations have been unable to approach. But at least Gyllenhaal's movie gives us some food for thought, even if it's mostly only accessible to those of us who have done our homework.

The Bride! is available on HBOMax.