The Bride! Gave Me a Brain Attack

The Bride! bombed and it deserved to. This article feels a bit like screaming into the void, because nobody saw this thing and they shouldn't, so why even talk about it? Well, for one, if I see something, I'm going to say something. For two, some people might try to convince you that Maggie Gyllenhaal was onto something, like it's an impossibility that she could be so misdirected. So, I'm going to say my piece and you all can just live with it.

Let's start with Gyllenhaal as a director. Her first film, The Lost Daughter, by all accounts, was really good. I haven't seen it, but apparently it's good. That's not why she got to make The Bride! She got to make The Bride! because she's Maggie Gyllenhaal, basically acting nobility and literally Swedish nobility. She is not a common woman or your best buddy. She's an aristocrat. So, let's just leave that as it is.

Starring are Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale. These two deliver great performances. That's no surprise, and honestly, thank goodness for them. Their scenes together, especially when it's just them two, are by far the best part of this movie. They're so committed and their dynamic is a joy to watch. But this isn't a song of two humans... The world of The Bride! is much bigger than that.

Unluckily, we have a subplot between Penélope Cruz doing her best Carmen Sandiego impersonation and Peter Sarsgaard. These two are detectives hot on the trail of the outlaw couple, Bride and Frank. Listen, because it's very simple: If you're going to include a subplot, don't half-ass it. Don't use it as a filler to get to the next Bride and Frank scene. I get that Sarsgaard is Gyllenhaal's husband and she probably wanted to include him for some reason, but this has to be his all-time-worst performance. The character he's given doesn't do him any favours. His whole story is told through exposition; nothing is shown. It creates painfully boring scenes. And Cruz is woefully miscast. It's America in the 1930s and there's an immigrant female detective in Chicago?

Okay, that's one choice where I could be like, "okay, I'll give Maggie that... Maybe an immigrant female detective really did exist in 1930s' America." The reason I'd give her the benefit of the doubt is because this movie is obsessed with the 1930s. Obviously, it's the setting, but Gyllenhaal also puts all of her 1930s Hollywood expertise onto the screen. Great. A huge win for all the 1930s-cinema fans out there. Why fill a movie that's meant to have mass appeal with archaic references and expect a 2026 audience to understand them? When will Hollywood realize that people around the world don't give a fuck about their insidious lore? It didn't work in Babylon. It didn't work in Hail, Caesar! Ok, fine, some people care a little, but you have to be pragmatic about your use of reference and homage.

And that brings us to my next diatribe: references and homages. When you break it down, was there anything actually original in The Bride!? It's based on the Frankenstein story, which, as vanessaonfilms so graciously pointed out, has been adapted over 400 times. It's as fresh as a corpse. Gyllenhaal's version is highly indebted to Bonnie and Clyde, another based on a true story that has been used for countless adaptations and iterations. Throw a feminist lens on top of all this and I'm expected to applaud this film's originality? Miss me with that, mainly because these feminist themes aren't original in the slightest.

This movie probably would have killed had it been released in 2018. Since the #MeToo Movement and the Harvey Weinstein case, there have been no shortage of female-rage stories about the problems with silencing women, believing victims, and giving women equal opportunities and agency. I'm all for it. Totally great. But now, in 2026, I've heard this narrative a lot and I'm ready for a fresh spin. Just in the past couple of years, there have been movies like Companion, Sorry Baby, Eden, Christy, The Housemaid, and those are just the ones I've seen. I'm not saying to silence women, but I'm saying that I require creativity and new ways to approach topics. The Bride! brings nothing new to the conversation, other than how hard it fucking flopped. Having Bride give a monologue at the end where she says "me too" more than once isn't fresh or exciting; it's just retreading exhausted tropes.

Retreading is another thing. As a man, how many movies am I expected to endure where every single male character is either toxic, a rapist, or both? Some writers even have the gall to say that Frank is the worst part of this movie because he's just a horny manipulator, which is a terrible misreading of the character. I get it: Men are sex monsters and women are angelic messes that deserve space to be flawed. But why must every man on screen be unforgiveably sadistic?

The Bride almost gets sexually assaulted twice in The Bride! Two assault scenes are always worse than one. We also have the mob boss, Lupino (named after Ida Lupino, the female director and trailblazer of the 1940s and 50s; same person who inspired Bride's original name of Ida — don't ask the meaning behind this duality because I sure as shit can't find one), who cuts out women's tongues. His character is so bloody static. It's like Gyllenhaal watched one episode of The Penguin and thought she understood mob mentality. Woefully understudied, but I don't really care because the character of Lupino was utterly pointless other than to give us another evil-man caricature.

Or the cop that pulls Bride and Frank over. He immediately starts groping Bride. It doesn't even make fucking sense, other than that he's a power tripper. All well and good, but it's been done to death. It feels like all men in movies that are in a position of power use their power to sexually abuse women. We get it. Stop showing me the same character over and over. Maybe you'd argue that men in power need to stop sexually abusing women and that all these displays in art haven't done their job of solving the sexual-assault crisis. But if they haven't solved it yet, maybe movies aren't the way to fix the problem. You're right, that's a dumb thought.

The Bride gets the space to be flawed, messy and still sympathetic. That's great. Good for her. Doesn't mean it makes for an engaging watch. Especially not when the writer-director cannot even maintain consistent believability in her film. I'm fine with inconsistencies in theme, vibe and mood. I think unexpectedness can make for a fun ride. But the rules of a world, once created, must be adhered to, or you're really going to make me mad.

I say this because there was a scene where The Bride! lost me completely and turned me into the hater you read now. Frank and Bride are on the run from the cops and they go to a swanky dinner party. There, Frank meets his hero, an old-timey actor, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. He's a man, so you know he's an irredeemable jackass. The cops bust in and the Bride ends up with a gun in her hand and she points it at everyone in the ballroom. All the cops just watch her as she waves the gun around, holds old-timey actor man hostage, shoots a fucking cop in the chest, and then Bride and Frank just escape. End scene. Wow, amazing, thank you so much, Ms. Gyllenhaal. Women really can do anything! That would have been fine had that mentality of not shooting the woman as if it's like a depression-era tradition of not filling dames with lead been maintained throughout the film. But then, at the big climax, The Bride is once again in a room and the cops rush in, but this time they just blow her away, shoot her back into the grave that she came from. If they're cool with shooting criminals on sight, why the fuck didn't they shoot her in the first scene? I hear detractors say, she can't get shot in that early scene because it would end the movie. Uh, yeah! I know. That's why it's a stupid creative choice. I'm all for backing your protagonist into a corner. Put pressure on them to force more complex drama. But it only works if you find a creative and somewhat logical way for the hero to escape an impossible situation. If you throw logic out with the bathwater, then what the fuck am I watching? Nothing matters, nothing makes sense, nothing has a point. If that's your vibe, cool. But then don't try to tack on some social commentary that's supposed to resonate if the world you've created is void of reason like a dadaist circus.

So, in the end, all I'm left asking is, what the fuck? We need female writer-directors to control $100-million movies. It's good for the culture. But we don't need another telling of the Frankenstein story. We don't need unsubtle, overt feminism in film. We don't need an opening title card that tells me Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein to be followed by the film's first line of dialogue being Mary Shelley saying something like, "It's me, Mary Shelley, writer of Frankenstein."

I don't know what the fuck Gyllenhaal thought she would achieve with this movie. Did she think women around the world would put black ink on their faces and start a revolution? Did she think we needed to hear this, like we haven't heard it repeatedly for the past eight years? Numbers don't lie. Nobody is fucking listening.

Feminist women don't want to be beholden to their husband. Even me, a man, telling feminist women what they don't want will almost surely make their blood boil. Men don't want to be told that they are all creepy rapists. Cinephiles don't need to be reminded of how great movies from the 1930s were because, uh, they weren't. And regular moviegoers don't want a movie that makes no fucking sense.

Give The Bride! all the slack you want. There's a reason it was a March release. Like its protagonist, it was dead on arrival.

The Bride!2026

I should probably edit this piece more, but if Gyllenhaal can be forgiven for being scatter-brained, ambitious, and lacking focus, then so should I, right? Equality, right?