{"id":2316075,"date":"2026-03-06T19:24:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2316075"},"modified":"2026-03-06T19:24:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T19:24:07","slug":"why-the-bride-is-really-polarizing-audiences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/why-the-bride-is-really-polarizing-audiences\/","title":{"rendered":"Why ‘The Bride!’ Is (Really) Polarizing Audiences"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Who knew Frankenstein was so controversial? On the heels of Guillermo del Toro\u2019s measured take<\/a> on the famous Mary Shelley monster, Maggie Gyllenhaal\u2019s The Bride! <\/em>with Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley debuted on Friday, March 6, to wildly polarizing reviews. While some critics like The AV Club\u2019s<\/a><\/em> Luke Hicks called it a \u201cbold, beautiful, feminist freakout,\u201d The celebrity.land\u2019<\/a><\/em>s Johnny Oleksinski wrote that it was \u201cone of the worst movies I\u2019ve seen in his job.\u201d What gives?<\/p>\n

The Bride! <\/em>draws inspiration from the original 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein<\/em>, wherein the monster asks Dr. Frankenstein\u2019s mentor to repeat the famous experiment and create a female companion for him. Gyllenhaal\u2019s film, which loosely follows the plot of the 1935 film, setting the story in 1930s Chicago. The new film paints Frankenstein and his Bride, Ida, as a sort of Bonnie & Clyde <\/em>crime couple, with Gyllenhaal stressing on press tours that she sought to reinterpret the Gothic story from the Bride\u2019s point of view. <\/p>\n

\u201cI just had this fantasy,\u201d Gyllenhaal told The LA Times<\/a><\/em>. \u201cI\u2019m not speaking for Mary Shelley, but there must have been some other, naughtier, wilder, more dangerous things that Mary Shelley wanted to say that weren\u2019t said in Frankenstein<\/em>. What else might she have wanted to express?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Courtesy of Warner Bros.<\/span><\/figcaption>

The Bride! <\/em>tells the story of Ida, the monster\u2019s female companion, but set in 1930\u2019s Chicago. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

Still, it seems critics weren\u2019t exactly vibing with her chain-smoking and gun-slinging recreations of Frankenstein. <\/p>\n

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In Alison Willmore\u2019s review for Vulture<\/a><\/em>, the film critic wrote that, \u201cI have no idea what The Bride!<\/em> is trying to say, but it sure is loud about it.\u201d She also said that the \u201cThe Bride!<\/em>\u2019s feminism is ultimately more pussy hat than punk rock in nature\u2026 like something that didn\u2019t have a consistent vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole thing is exhausting, at times wincingly self-indulgent, entirely heartfelt and yet also relatable, wrote The New York Times<\/a><\/em> chief film critic Manohla Dargis, \u201cperhaps especially for women who, when confronted with unrelenting monstrousness, need to give birth to their own monsters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other critics didn\u2019t even know how to feel, let alone articulate themselves. <\/p>\n

\u201c\u2019Is it a ghost story, a horror story, or most frightening of all, a love story?\u2019\u201d David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter<\/a> <\/em>said was one of the lines from the film. <\/em>\u201cI sure couldn\u2019t tell you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bride!<\/em> is more a film to feel than to explain,\u201d Tomris Laffly wrote<\/a> for RogerEbert.com. <\/em>\u201cIt is a movie lover\u2019s movie that disarmingly worships cinema, a cacophony of ideas (some invigorating, some half-realized) that playfully mines Mary Shelley\u2019s gothic classic, a romantic turn-on, and a rightful feminine scream all in one.\u201d <\/p>\n

It sounds to me like Gyllenhaal really swung for the fences on this one, and you simply must hand it to her for trying. I\u2019d way rather see twenty The Bride!<\/em>\u2019s swing and miss then another twenty Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Slops<\/em>. Betting on big auteurs to make a fool of themselves on screen is what this business is all about, no? How else would Warner Bros. also give audiences Sinners<\/a> <\/em>and One Battle After Another<\/a> <\/em>last year if it didn’t take risks? So, even if The Bride! <\/em>is more Joker Folie \u00e0 Deux<\/a> <\/em>then Thelma & Louise<\/em>, I say keep them coming. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.esquire.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who knew Frankenstein was so controversial? On the heels of Guillermo del Toro\u2019s measured take on the famous Mary Shelley monster, Maggie Gyllenhaal\u2019s The Bride! with Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley debuted on Friday, March 6, to wildly polarizing reviews. While some critics like The AV Club\u2019s Luke Hicks called it a \u201cbold, beautiful, feminist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2316076,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[274717,448732,285977,285684,448731,438951],"class_list":["post-2316075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-content-type-news","tag-contentid-2813c20a-e465-45c7-b912-2d5c9ec00077","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-locale-us","tag-shorttitle-why-the-bride-is-really-polarizing-audiences","tag-subsection-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Why-The-Bride-Is-Really-Polarizing-Audiences.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2316075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2316077,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316075\/revisions\/2316077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2316076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2316075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2316075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2316075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}