The title of the 2026 feature film, The Bride!, indeed includes the exclamation point, and that is because the movie’s writer-director, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the film’s lead actor, Jessie Buckley, are angry and have Things To Say and we all had better listen! This essay explores – and praises! – the movie’s righteous and rebellious exclamations, and we will see – and enjoy! – how  “writerly” the film is. (And I will stop with the exclamation marks after this paragraph.)

Released in the spring of 2026 by Warner Bros., The Bride! is, above all else, a cry of female rage. (This essay reveals plot details.) The film’s plot is very loosely based on previous “monster movies” about the bride of Frankenstein. In those old mostly black-and-white movies, the famous monster created by Dr. Frankenstein pines for a mate just like him, and the good doctor obliges by finding a dead woman and reanimating her, ostensibly to give his monster a creature who will love him – an undead bride for an undead man. Things go wrong, and no one ends up happily ever after. The Bride! utilizes this story as a jumping off point to tell its own story, set in Depression-era gangster land Chicago.

The story Gyllenhaal tells is about consent (or lack thereof) and rebellion. If her version is a “monster movie”, too, then the monsters are men and the horror is misogyny.

The movie opens and closes with wonderfully meta, breaking-the-fourth wall bits: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of the original Gothic novel, Frankenstein, published in 1818, is played by Jessie Buckley, and she speaks to us, talking about the writing of her story (extradiegetic) as well as about the characters and the story (diegetic). Shelley says that she couldn’t say everything she wanted to say in her novel, or in real life, but now she can speak her truth.

Main Character Energy and Reclaiming the Narrative

As the story unfolds, we realize that our protagonist, the Bride, has become possessed (like in a horror movie) by Mary Shelley. In several key moments during the movie, Shelley speaks with the Bride. That the Bride is also played by Jessie Buckley just makes the meta even more playfully meta. It is the writer, Gyllenhaal, letting the writer, Shelley, write the story right in front of our eyes. Ready for even more mirror-in-a-mirror? It is also the story’s character being able to have a dialogue with the story’s author at crucial points in the story. Is there any more Main Character Energy than that?

According to conventional literary wisdom, Shelley wrote her novel on a dare. Several famous Gothic-era writers were challenged by the writer, Lord Byron, to come up with a horror story. Guess whose novel became a timeless classic? That Shelley was a woman is incredible given the time. Frankenstein first was published anonymously to conceal the fact that its author was a woman. But the book’s popularity allowed Shelley’s identity to be revealed. Wikipedia excerpts this typically sexist critique of her novel: “The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.” Read more about Mary Shelley’s novel in NWW’s Frankenstein by Woman Writer Mary Shelley.

What Gyllenhaal accomplishes with this extra-diegesis sleight-of-hand is to bring “reclaiming the narrative” to a whole other level. That feels very feminist, and literary, to me, but many critics and audiences dismissed it as gimmickry. Then again, art and entertainment are littered with dismissals when women speak up.

Fortunately for the cinematic world, Gyllenhaal and her Bride won’t be quiet.

#MeToo

Before exploring the movie further, it is worth some speculation to provide more context. Maggie Gyllenhaal, born in 1977 in New York City to movie industry parents, is a well-known and successful movie actor and, more recently, a writer-director. She has 50 acting credits on her IMDb profile. One can imagine what she has experienced and seen and heard during decades of being an actress in Hollywood. The #MeToo uprising was in no small part driven by [sadly] countless actresses speaking up about toxic work situations and sexual harassment and assault. And naming names. Bill Cosby, James Franco, Brett Ratner, Louis CK, Woody Allen, and of course, Harvey Weinstein were some of the marquee offenders, but there were [sadly] many other men in the entertainment industry who preyed upon actresses.

Gyllenhaal also has a brother who is a famous A-list actor, Jake Gyllenhaal (70 acting credits on IMDb, but who’s counting?). She cast him in The Bride! as a self-loving movie star, which seems funny and sweet at the same time. I imagine that Maggie has an interesting perspective on stardom and Hollywood – she can compare her experiences to her brother’s. What sexism has she endured that he hasn’t? What advances and unwanted attentions has she had to turn down or fight off that he hasn’t? How is she dealing with the public’s ceaseless body policing and beauty judgments that her brother doesn’t have to? I read a critique of The Bride! that said that “Maggie Gyllenhaal hasn’t aged well” and included a picture of her looking like the middle-aged woman that she is. I am still waiting for a critique of The Odyssey that includes a photo of a haggard-looking Christopher Nolan.

Which is all to speculate that her movie is deeply infused with a well-earned feminist axe to grind. I think that Maggie Gyllenhaal is extremely talented as a screenwriter and movie director, and I think she is fucking angry about the patriarchy.

When our Bride shouts “Me, too! Me, too!” in a dramatic scene of conflict, more delicate viewers recoiled and said that was too on-the-nose. I found the moment bracing. When our Bride and other female characters are physically assaulted by packs of men, easily offended viewers criticized the on-screen actions as “woke”. I found the scenes resonant and appropriately enraging.

Most resonant to me is the movie’s theme of consent and, very relatedly, autonomy. In both Gyllenhaal’s version and the original Hollywood monster movies, the bride of Frankenstein is, quite literally, a woman killed by a man who is reanimated without her consent to become the romantic partner of the monster – without her consent. It is like femicide and forced marriage combined into one. In the 1935 movie version of The Bride of Frankenstein, the Bride doesn’t speak. Chef’s kiss, patriarchy.

Jessie Buckley portrays her character’s confusion and suffering brilliantly. (Buckley won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare’s wife in the 2025 movie, Hamnet, which itself was nominated for Best Picture. Some critics say Buckley is one of most talented movie actors working today, and I would agree.) The movie reveals, via intermittent flashbacks, what happened to her character earlier before she was exhumed and reanimated: She was masquerading as an escort to try to bring down a gangster who traffics women. He had her murdered, and she meets him again, but this time as our Bride, and she extracts vengeance. Her pre-reanimation memories had returned, her suffering isn’t gone … but she finds some measure of justice.

The scene leading up to the gangster’s comeuppance is powerful as Mary Shelley/The Bride speak the names of all the women he and his gang have exploited, killed, and mutilated (the gangster keeps “trophies” of the dead, like a serial killer). The scene is “Say her name” depicted with the fury that the moment calls for.

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jessie Buckley

“I would prefer not to.”

An unexpected and delightful subplot involves women reading about the Bride’s exploits as she runs away from the police and from gangsters, her would-be groom, the original Frankenstein’s creature, her literal partner-in-crime. Many critics noted the cinematic homage Gyllenhaal paid to the 1967 movie, Bonnie and Clyde, in her depiction of the Bride’s and the creature’s on-the-lam run and eventual gunning down by the police. Stylistically, the hat tips are there and are on-point, if bullet-ridden (and perhaps the law enforcement gunfire overkill is meant to show how men like to escalate things quickly), but I think thematically, Gyllenhaal is calling back to that movie for its anti-authority stance. As these women – many of them, notably, escorts, dance hall girls, secretaries – read about the Bride’s exploits, they start wearing makeup and clothing to mimic her, and they use the phrase “Brain attack!” as a battle cry against patriarchy. Our Bride utters the phrase because jolts of her earlier life and victimization combine with her newfound second life and strength to light up her thoughts. She might as well be saying “I’ve woken up!” instead of “Brain attack!”, and I loved it. A writer in Cosmopolitan magazine described the women as “a punk feminist movement”, and that is an apt characterization.

To be fair, that “brain attack!” subplot, as delightful as it is, was underdeveloped in the movie, but it is cool that Gyllenhaal included it, especially because Bonnie and Clyde had no such grassroots seedlings.

Also not as solid was the story’s depiction of the relationship between our Bride and the creature who asked to have a bride. Consent gets muddied here, as well as the Bride’s eventual affections for the creature (who, by the cheeky way, calls himself “Frank”). I will refer now to an interview quote from Jessie Buckley when she was doing press for the movie’s opening: “This film is about autonomy of the self and incubating your monster, your shadows so you can be in undeniable full-bodied relationship with each other. How much of me can you actually love? Not just the idea of me.”

Throughout the movie, Buckley’s Bride is put upon by men, sometimes verbally and sometimes physically. The scene in the third act with the police officer frisking her against a car is unsettlingly familiar in a real-world way. As the sexist power dynamic plays itself out in the scene, our Bride says “I would prefer not to” when commanded by the cop. She says “I would prefer not to” several times in the movie. But each time she does not give her consent, the men ignore her stated preference.

“I would prefer not to” is the refrain of Bartleby, the Scrivener, the main character in a short story by Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame. Bartleby says the words as a protest against an employer. I love the literary reference and how the polite expression gives the movie’s male characters a chance to politely leave well enough alone. How many women since the beginning of time have tried to politely decline an advance, to remain respectful while fending off an encroachment, only to have the boundary crossed anyway. I think of Thelma being nice to Harlan even when he’s clearly in sweaty-faced predator mode (Thelma & Louise, 1991). I think of Kayla in the backseat of the car when Riley tells her to take off her shirt and she says she doesn’t want to (Eighth Grade, 2018).

The Manosphere Reacts

This website’s reclamation of the slur “nasty” to describe feminist women writers brings us to my last point: the near-universal revile that The Bride! received upon release.

As barometers for both critics’ reviews and general audience reception, check out the average ratings of the movie (as of July 2026) on Metacritic – 55/100, IMDb – 5.6/10, and Letterboxd – 2.8/5. Those are very low ratings. If you scan online reviews and comments, you see many criticisms of The Bride! going hyperbolic about how awful it is. “Utmost disaster”, “utter disappointment”, “utterly vapid” (lots of “utters”), and clickbait headlines about how the movie was “dead on arrival at the box office.” According to Hollywood industry trade news, the movie grossed $24 million globally. For a movie that reportedly cost $90 million to make before marketing expenses, the film was a bomb, at least financially for the studio.

Obviously, I think the movie is fantastic, but I believe that terrible word-of-mouth and widespread negative critics’ reviews killed the theatrical run, causing its box office failure. The movie itself is kinetic, unexpected, and extremely entertaining. Why did The Bride! engender such blistering criticism? If you conduct a Google search for receptions and reactions to the movie, one of Google’s “People also asked” suggested search queries is “Is the movie The Bride! woke?”

You could practically smell the manosphere waking itself up from a nap on the Sunday sofa, downing an energy drink, and unleashing righteous hell on the movie. Even professional critics who likely would call themselves fair and apolitical went off on the movie. We live in a world today where labeling a work of art or entertainment “feminist” is meant as – and received by some as – a deep insult. But when this world calls you “nasty”, you know you’re doing something right. Much of the criticism was directed personally at Gyllenhaal (see above). How dare a middle-aged actress make an unconventional big-budget movie foregrounding a woman character fighting for her autonomy against male-dominated society? And what the hell was that dance number in the middle of the movie?  She was practically a nasty woman writer-director for having made the movie. That is not even taking into account the double standard in Hollywood where female artists are held to a much higher standard than male artists.

To be fair, you can hunt out a few positive reviews of the movie. See The Critics Are Wrong: Long Live The Bride! written by Ande Thomas in the horror blog, What Sleeps Beneath, and the review, The Bride! Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Feminist Monster Mash, written by Tim Jackson in The Arts Fuse online arts magazine. And of course, random individuals on the Internet will praise the movie. But the overwhelming conventional wisdom is that The Bride! is a terrible movie and deserved to be a failure in large part because it was “woke”, “feminist”, and too angry.

Gyllenhaal certainly touched a nerve, didn’t she?

In the closing credits, you see “For my daughters”, and Gyllenhaal has said in interviews that she dedicated the movie to them. I don’t think that she wants her daughters to go on a crime-ridden anti-misogynist run from the law. But I do think that she wants them to see how their mother has found her voice and told her own story, unapologetically and emphatically, with an exclamation point.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is a Nasty Woman writer and filmmaker.

©Harry Lin 2026