The Bride!: A Review - Dead on Arrival

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This monster mishap is DOA.

The Bride!, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is a re-imagining of the story of The Bride of Frankenstein set in 1936 Chicago and starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale.

The Bride! hit theatres on March 6th with a resounding thud, bombing at the box office and attracting harsh reviews from critics. The film is now available to stream on Max, which is where I just watched it.

As I’ve written before, I love Frankenstein. I love the book (in both its 1818 and 1831 versions), love the original film, and even love some of the later films. For some reason I’m not quite capable of articulating, I just really dig the character and its deeper meaning.

That said, I don’t love all things Frankenstein…a perfect example being my disenchantment with Guillermo del Toro’s version of the story released last year. I got a lot of pushback for my review of that movie…but I stick by my criticism of it.

As for The Bride!, it has some things going for it…namely it stars two fantastic talents in its lead roles, Academy Award winner Jessie Buckley and Academy Award winner Christian Bale.

Unfortunately, even the talents of Buckley and Bale cannot save this uncinematic monstrosity as it is a monumental, colossal disaster area of a movie.

The film is so poorly and amateurishly written it feels like it was pasted together from magazine clippings by a freshman Feminist Studies major having a fever dream after consuming copious amounts of alcohol, mushrooms and righteousness pills.

For some unknown reason the film uses Buckley in two roles, one is Ida – a Chicago moll running with a bad crowd, and the other is the spirit of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) who periodically narrates from the afterlife and occasionally inhabits Ida’s soul. This decision is baffling as it unnecessarily confuses an already overly confused plot.

Buckley does her best with the dual roles…but the script is a leaden albatross around her delicate neck, and it ultimately asphyxiates her despite her noble attempts to keep breathing.

Christian Bale plays Frank – who is Frankenstein’s monster still alive after the good doctor made him a century earlier, and he struggles mightily to find a thread of coherence in his character as the script gives him absolutely none.

It takes an extraordinary director to fumble the talents of Buckley and Bale in such remarkable ways…but Maggie Gyllenhaal is up to the task.

Gyllenhaal is a putrid filmmaker blinded by her pedestrian and puerile personal politics that encompass little more than her defiantly shouting at the top of her lungs that she is the ultimate victim because she has a vagina. Yawn.

Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut was 2021’s The Lost Daughter, which starred Buckley and Olivia Colman. It was well-received mostly because it pandered to the most regressive progressives in the film industry. I found the film to be a muddled mess of a movie that revealed Gyllenhaal to be ham-handed at best. The Bride! is such an incoherent and myopic mess it makes The Lost Daughter look like Citizen Kane.

To be clear, I understand what Gyllenhaal was trying to do, and I even respect and admire the idea…she was trying to literally make a Frankenstein monster of a movie…cobbled together with disparate parts to make an outwardly ugly but beautifully misfit feminist monster.

Combine that idea with the stylistic flair of setting it in 1930s Chicago and all of the distinct flair that era had, and The Bride! has, in theory, a lot with which to work.

The problem though is that Gyllenhaal is not capable enough of a director to pull off such an ambitious and audacious project, and therefore The Bride!, which has musical numbers, fantasy sequences, and homages to film noir, gangster and detective movies, and Hollywood in the 1930s, is a scattered mess of a monstrous movie that befuddles and befouls.

Besides squandering the talent of Buckley and Bale, Gyllenhaal fumbles two other terrific actors, Peter Sarsgaard (Gyllenhaal’s husband) and Penelope Cruz.

Sarsgaard and Cruz play Jake and Myrna, a pseudo-detective duo on the trail of the disfigured Bonnie and Clyde that are Frank and Ida…except Myrna isn’t a detective because she has a vagina – so she’s just Jake’s secretary despite being astronomically smarter than he is. Ugh.

Cruz is so wooden and dead-eyed in this role, and so horrifically miscast, it is stunning to behold. Sarsgaard too feels like he just woke up and wandered onto the wrong set.

Another abominable performance comes from Annette Bening, who plays Dr. Euphronious – a modern-day feminist Dr. Frankenstein…or I guess Nurse Frankenstein since women obviously can never be doctors. Bening does her usual thing but does it without the least of of inner life or intensity.

The second half of the film goes completely off the rails as the story tries to become a revolutionary cry (literally) for women of all stripes to come together to tear off the burden the patriarchy places upon them, but it ends up just making women seem extraordinarily foolish, silly and unserious in every way…Ms. Gyllenhaal most of all.

The one good thing I would say about the film is that I thought the make up for Christian Bale’s Frank was very well done and grotesque in a cool sort of way. In contrast, Buckley’s make up was cool in a grotesque sort of way.

Beyond that, The Bride! is reminiscent of Jeb Bush’s ill-fated 2016 run for the presidency. Remember good old Jeb, whose campaign slogan was Jeb! – sharing the exclamation point with The Bride! That exclamation for Jeb! was so that people could feel the unbridled excitement of wet turd Jeb Bush, the dullest nepo baby of all political nepo babies.

One of the funniest moments of the rather hysterical 2016 campaign was when Jeb! was giving a speech at a town hall in some godforsaken Republican douchetown and he finished the speech with his signature flaccid flair and was greeted with dead silence. Then Jeb! meekly, desperately, humiliatingly, begged the crowd…”please clap”….and they reluctantly did.

That impotent, flack-written, flailing and failing stump speech given by Jeb!, was the political equivalent of The Bride! And ironically, both Jeb! and The Bride! were met with either outright disdain or aggressive disinterest. Tough break for the nepo babies Jeb and Maggie.

Ultimately, The Bride! is a total waste of time and energy. It maybe not should have, but definitely could have, been an interesting movie, but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s incompetence as a director and writer made sure that this movie was never going to come together in any coherent, interest, or insightful way.

The bottom line is this…I watched The Bride! so don’t have to…and trust me…you really don’t have to.

©2026

Mr. Jones: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Not worth paying to see, but the striking and unnerving scenes of the Holomodor are worthy of your time to watch when it comes out on Netflix or cable.

Mr. Jones, directed by Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa, is the true story of British journalist Gareth Jones as he discovers and then reveals the horrors of Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine in 1933. The film stars James Norton as Jones, with supporting turns from Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard.

Agnieszka Holland is an interesting cinematic figure. In 1990 she wrote and directed Europa, Europa, a staggeringly brilliant film about the remarkable life of Solomon Perel during World War II for which Holland garnered a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Ever since Europa, Europa though, Holland has churned out absolutely nothing of note.

The tepid mediocrity of Ms. Holland’s filmography from 1991 to present day may explain why I had never even heard of Mr. Jones until I was assigned to watch it and write about it.

That said, as a big fan of Europa, Europa, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, as well as being a Russophile and an admirer of good journalism, I thought Mr. Jones might just hit my sweet spot and be a new cinematic feast amidst the current coronavirus movie famine.

Sadly…while there were certainly some powerful sequences, overall the lackluster direction and script left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

The biggest problem with Mr. Jones is that it is wildly uneven, with a devastatingly poor narrative structure.

The first half of the film plays out like a PBS melodrama…and not a very good one. Holland attempts to give a stylized view of the suffocating conformity of the British establishment, and then the debased debauchery of Walter Duranty’s Moscow, but is never quite able to adequately pull it off.

Another major structural issue is Holland’s choice to weave George Orwell’s writing of Animal Farm into the story. Shockingly, Orwell actually opens the movie and is used as a landmark throughout the narrative. The snippets of Orwell are at best frivolous and do nothing more than distract from the main dramatic thrust of the story.

The second half of the film is much, much better than the first. Midway through the film shifts to the devastation in Ukraine, and this is where Holland finds her footing. The scenes of starvation and desperation are exceedingly well-done and uncomfortable to watch. There is one sequence that is so brutal it left me unnerved for days. Holland’s use of the bleak and foreboding Ukrainian winter exquisitely conveys the existential depth and expanse of the ocean of suffering that was the Holomodor.

The problem though is that Holland failed to adequately build a dramatic foundation upon which to lay the tragedy of the Holomodor. I think the film actually would’ve been better served if it started with the trip to Ukraine, as that approach would have emphasized the brutal nature of the topic at hand from the get go. It also would have given context to Jones’ struggle and maybe even better fleshed out his character, which is remarkably paper-thin in the film.

Make no mistake though that Gareth Jones’ story is compelling and definitely worthy of a major movie, just that Ms. Holland is unable to tell the story with enough dramatic vigor or cinematic verve to do it justice. I couldn’t help but think that Gareth Jones life was worthy of an HBO or Netflix mini-series, as there is awful lot of meaningful story to tell.

In terms of the acting, the cast all do solid, if unspectacular, work.

James Norton brings an every man sort of energy to his Gareth Jones, which makes sense, but he definitely suffers from a charisma deficit, makes is a hindrance to his carrying the entirety of the movie. Norton never commands the screen or demands the audience’s attention, which at times undermines the film’s dramatic power.

The luminous Vanessa Kirby plays Ada Brooks, a sort of love interest to Jones. Kirby is an alluring and at times intoxicating screen presence, but is vastly misused and under utilized in Mr. Jones. Kirby is blessed with a striking screen magnetism but never gets to put meat on the bones of her character, which is a terrible waste of her prodigious talents.

Peter Sarsgaard is always an intriguing and emotionally complicated actor, and his morally compromised and diseased Walter Duranty is no exception. Sarsgaard has minimal screen time but makes the most of it as he limps and slithers through the scenery like the devil with whom Duranty made his deal.

Mr. Jones premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival back in 2019, and debuted for British audiences in February of 2020 and was scheduled to be released in the U.S. in April of 2020…but coronavirus rudely intervened.

The film was then released for purchase (but not for rent!) on streaming services in mid-June…and since I was hired to write about it, I reached into my expense account cookie jar and bought the movie for $14.99. Maybe it is my coronavirus budget talking but even though $14.99 is basically the price of a movie ticket here in the City of Angels, I found that price to be excessive.

My recommendation regarding Mr. Jones is not to purchase it…the cost is too high and it simply isn’t worth it. But I do think it might be worth watching for free on Netflix or cable when it comes out. The scenes of the Holomodor alone are worth the investment of time.

The bottom line is this…Mr. Jones is a great story (and Gareth Jones was a great man) but not a great film.

©2020