New Release: The Bride! Review

The Bride! showed promise but had one too many fumbles.  Wanted to love it but couldn’t.

The Bride! (2026)

The Bride! is a gothic horror-romance take on Bonnie & Clyde for us oldsters, or Wild at Heart/Thelma and Louis for those, well, I guess, still old.

What works:  It’s difficult to give Christian Bale and Jesse Buckley anything that they won’t shine in, but this movie does test the boundaries of that. You do have two of the best-skilled actors in this movie, along with some fun with Penelope Cruz, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Peter Sarsgaard.  All of them are a delight in the grounded parts of the movie. In the end, they still very much deliver great performances in this quagmire of a movie. Also, it is visually beautiful. The coloring in some of the shots is beautifully done, and it is quite dynamic on the big screen… however…

Christian Bale and Jesse Buckley are monster versions of Bonnie & Clyde

What doesn’t: The script and premise of this movie are somewhat psychotic.  Not in a fun, unhinged way, but more along the lines of being choppy, you feel the lack of cohesion with all the different genres that were attempted, but couldn’t gel together. It handles the Frankenstein mythos in almost a, yeah, the undead exist, they’re still monsters, but a tragic love story along the lines of Bonnie and Clyde needed more gravitas and less “oh hey, here’s a ‘Putting on the Ritz’ Frankenstein wink”. I suppose she was going for a smirk at a playful moment, but honestly, it made me wince during a moment of interrupted gravity. This was a dark romance, but you feel zero emotion once The Bride is introduced, so any sympathy one feels for Bale’s Creature drifts away until perhaps the final moments of the movie.

The one question I was left with was…Why not pick a thread and pull it?  One thread. Using the 30s Bonnie & Clyde style, but then injecting modern music into parts, but not enough to provide a rhythm. Also, treating feminism as if one needs to be possessed to experience it. I don’t mind a “monster” introducing the idea, but it loses its value when even she isn’t in control of it. Perhaps the 30000-foot view is that during that time it would’ve been considered a monstrous idea for female freedom, but don’t play into the notion that psychosis is needed.  Just an odd choice in my opinion, and felt like the message got a bit lost or tarnished in the film’s interpretation.

Not even Buckley could save this mess

The movie was trying to make broad statements about feminism, corruption, and finding one’s soulmate, but it made such a mess of it that all the ideas felt muddled and a tad directionless. As a monster lover and goth horror/romance movie, I really thought this would be up my alley. Unfortunately, I think it’s going to swing and miss among many audience members.

But hey, who knew Jake Gyllenhaal made such a great 30s Fred Astaire singing and dancing type?

2.5/5