Making a Frankenstein movie is apparently an act of punk rock rebellion now, which explains why Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! feels less like a period drama and more like a fever dream you have after eating expired cheese while reading Mary Shelley. The behind-the-scenes footage reveals a director who knows exactly what she’s doing and a cast that’s slightly terrified but fully committed to her vision.
Jessie Buckley, who plays the titular Bride, describes her character as “formidable when she’s reinvigorated,” which is one way to describe a woman made from corpse parts who wakes up with the intensity of a laser beam. Buckley saw the role as a discovery process—the Bride doesn’t know who she is, where she is, or why she’s been reborn into this particular body with this particular man staring at her with desperate loneliness. She has tenacity and a mind, which in Gyllenhaal’s 1936 Chicago makes her either a miracle or a threat, depending on who’s looking.
Christian Bale plays Frankenstein, because if you’re going to make a movie about a lonely man who creates life and then regrets it, you might as well hire the actor who’s made a career playing isolated geniuses with poor social skills. Bale approached the role as a nod to Boris Karloff filtered through Mary Shelley’s original text, creating a monster who’s been breathing for years but only starts living when the Bride arrives. He’s dying of loneliness, which in this film is basically the default setting for every character. Frank would be happy with someone to sit on a log with and share bread in silence. Instead he gets Jessie Buckley as a “firecracker” on a mission from God, and suddenly realizes he was just breathing before, not actually alive.
Annette Bening plays a scientist named Dr. Euphrosyne, which is exactly the kind of name you give a character when you want her to sound like she reads ancient Greek for fun. Bening describes her as having “equal parts scientific obsession and passionate love,” a woman who went off the rails because of a relationship and decided the rules of the scientific community no longer applied to her. She’s on the fringe, well-known in certain circles, and definitely doesn’t play by the rules. In other words, she’s the kind of woman who gets things done while men are still filling out permission slips.
The supporting cast reads like a wish list of actors who can handle weird material. Penelope Cruz plays Detective Wilds’ partner, the “girl Friday” who’s actually running the investigation while her jaded superior questions his life choices. Tim Roth plays Beckett, a fascist treasurer who tries to recruit the wrong people to his cause. Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, and Rebecca Ferguson round out an ensemble that Gyllenhaal directs with what can only be described as controlled chaos.
Gyllenhaal’s directing style, according to her cast, involves unlimited energy and approximately seventeen monitors. She gives notes while doing cross-coverage, watching two screens simultaneously, directing two actors at once, all while maintaining what Bale calls a “fluid and easy” presence. Her vision comes from “a place of punk”—taking a story that has existed for centuries and creating something “absolutely singularly hers.” The film is disobedient, sexy, anti-establishment, and refuses to follow the path you expect.
The Bride herself is larger than life, iconic, born from the dead, superhuman, super powerful, and somehow also a beautiful homage to cinema from every decade. Buckley is doing things with language and sound and accents that her co-stars describe as “astonishing.” She’s not afraid, or rather she is afraid but goes ahead anyway, like great athletes do. The result is a performance that redefines what a monster movie can be.
This is what happens when you let a madwoman make a monster movie. The Bride! arrives March 7, 2026, and it’s going to ruin every other Frankenstein adaptation for you.
Watch The Bride! behind the scenes footage on our YouTube channel and subscribe for more exclusive content from the set of this revolutionary take on the Frankenstein myth.