The Bride!
A radical vision of resurrection in a feminist Frankenstein film
***edit*** Thanks to Dustin Marquel for catching that I was calling Ida “Ingrid”. Fixed!
I. The Resurrection Wears Black
I stare down the sterile, polite corridors of modern theology and wonder what living in the power of the resurrection actually means. Most days, the church treats the concept like a celestial participation trophy. They expect me to value it while systems of cruelty grind the world into dust. A spiritualized sedative helps no one when the patriarchy trades Victorian corsets for algorithmic surveillance and expects us to smile while we choke.
Then Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! hit me like a physical shock. The film presents a surreal, grease-painted fever dream. It frames resurrection as the joyful, defiant act of becoming a monster right here, right now. It delighted me. I truly had no idea where the lightning bolt would strike next. It wraps a warm, stitched-together arm around my shoulder, hands me a torch, and points directly at the castle.
A meta-flourish sets the stakes immediately. Jessie Buckley, playing Mary Shelley, insists she has more story to tell. She arrives to weave a sequel that screams a warning about men who play god. The performance turns divine when Shelley’s spirit possesses Ida - also played by Buckley. Ida works as a mob-escort for the police in 1930s Chicago. She hurdles toward her own imminent death, completely blind to the drop.
Buckley executes this transition with staggering, raw talent. Relying on zero special effects, she shifts from Ida - a woman surviving a world of dangerous men—to the possessed vessel of her own author-god. She bounces between vulnerable character and primal, creative authority. Ida resurrects as the titular Bride, an unhinged avatar of reckoning. When that spirit occupies the stitched-together corpse, I saw a new kind of resurrection. The author returns to her creation to ensure the monsters finally have the absolute last word.
II. Monster Theory 101
Scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Theory explains exactly why The Bride! feels so potent. Cohen outlines seven theses to define our terror. His core idea argues that the monster operates as a harbinger of category crisis. Humans demand clear boundaries between life and death, male and female, natural and artificial. When a creature shatters those boxes, it terrifies us. A zombie terrifies us because it walks around dead. A werewolf frightens us because it blurs the line between human and beast. The monster forces society to face the fragility of its absolute categories.
For decades, cinematic Frankenstein monsters served as vessels for our technological anxieties. From the 1931 Karloff classic to Guillermo del Toro’s recent gothic masterpiece, Victor takes center stage. The tech-bro archetype plays God without humility and creates a life he refuses to parent. The monster represents a tragic byproduct of male ego. He acts as the AI learning to hate its creator; he embodies the industrial revolution’s discarded child.
We must trace the exact lineage of Gyllenhaal’s vision. She bypasses a direct sequel to Shelley’s novel and completely reimagines James Whale’s 1935 cinematic milestone, Bride of Frankenstein. This distinction anchors the feminist framework of the story. Whale created a post-Shelley mythology. He invoked the author in his prologue to justify his cinematic expansion—a structural echo Gyllenhaal deliberately employs today. Whale conjured the Bride simply to satisfy the male monster’s loneliness, then promptly destroyed her.
Gyllenhaal remakes the film to target that specific cinematic misogyny. She shifts the category crisis from the laboratory to the domestic sphere. The Bride! becomes a monster simply because she refuses to play the quiet, grateful accessory. Defying both the male gaze and the mortician’s slab, she stands as the ultimate Third Thing—a stitched-together accumulation of history, trauma, and suppressed rage. When she finally stands up, she frays the borders of the patriarchal world at the seams.
III. The Tongue Collector
Every monster needs a hunter. In Gyllenhaal’s 1930s Chicago, the hunters wear badges or bespoke suits. A systemic rot drives the film’s primary antagonists: a police force protecting a mobster who keeps a literal collection of tongues—trophies he cuts from the mouths of women who dared to speak, to whistle-blow, or to say a simple, inconvenient no.
This grotesque horror perfectly captures the monstrous status quo. It manifests a society demanding women remain eternally pleasant and fundamentally silent. In the original 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, the Bride never speaks. She hisses, screams, and dies. She serves as a mere plot point in Victor’s tragedy.
Gyllenhaal’s film rages against this silence. It introduces a revolutionary movement where women across the country adopt the Bride’s aesthetic. They don black mouth make-up and black net veils to commit acts of calculated chaos while shouting a specific, haunting slogan:
BRAIN STRIKE!
This movement responds directly to the Tongue Collector. If the system demands silence, we must respond with a scream that shatters the glass ceilings and shakes the city to its foundations. To declare a BRAIN STRIKE means refusing to use our minds to prop up the men holding the jars. The monster joyfully reclaims her own electricity.
IV. Bonnie and Clyde of the Bardo
The relationship between Frank (Christian Bale) and the Bride sits at the heart of the film. Gyllenhaal self-consciously frames them as a Bonnie and Clyde duo, adding a supernatural twist. We grow up with the myth of Bonnie and Clyde as the young and the damned. Even today, walking the neighborhoods of North Texas mere steps from their old hideouts, culture remembers them as outlaws hurtling toward an impending doom and a coming hail of bullets.
Frank and the Bride bypass that doom. They already stood in the hail of bullets. They already felt the cold slab. They already survived the absolute worst the world can dish out.
Here, Gyllenhaal merges the political and spiritual layers into pure explosive power. American culture teaches us to fear death above all else. The State maintains control through the threat of violence, incarceration, and the end. We must wonder what happens to a power structure when its subjects simply stop fearing death.
Frank and the Bride become avatars of resistance because they occupy a space completely invulnerable to the Empire’s primary currency: fear. They operate as post-dead outlaws. The state cannot execute a ghost. The patriarchy holds zero leverage over a woman who already laughed in the face of the reaper. By leaning into the Bonnie and Clyde trope, Gyllenhaal reveals a love story standing firmly on the foundation of since death brought us together. They build a domesticity on the ruins of the world that rejected them.
V. Dead to the World
This invites a radical reading of the Apostle Paul. In Galatians 6:14, Paul claims he will only boast about the cross of Jesus Christ, an instrument that crucified the world to him, and him to the world.
The church usually presents this in a pietistic sense. They suggest Paul simply no longer feels the temptation of a sinful world. Through the lens of The Bride!, a dangerous, thrilling meaning emerges. Paul talks about liberation through execution.
To experience crucifixion to the world means dying to the world’s power. If the World—the Empire, the System, the Patriarchy—already executed us, it used up its last card. It stands completely impotent. Paul asserts a status of holy monstrosity. He says he walks as a dead person, and therefore, he walks as the most dangerous presence in the Roman Empire. A dead person has no fear. A dead person is truly free.
The Bride! embodies Galatians 6. The world of the Tongue Collector executed her, entirely removing her need to seek the approval of the mob or the protection of the police. Her power of resurrection gives her the existential freedom to stand in the middle of a corrupt street and shout BRAIN STRIKE! while bullets pass right through her. It serves as a divine middle finger to the empire of death.
VI. Puttin’ on the Ritz: A Liturgy of Resistance
The Puttin’ on the Ritz sequence delights and surprises more than any other scene. Critics call it tonally jarring and miss the entire point. In the 1974 Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks used this song as a gag. He showed a monster trying to achieve civilization for a laughing audience.
Gyllenhaal subverts this completely in a scene where Frank and the Bride disrupt a high-class party. The scene’s climax is a flash-mob-esque dance number where Frank and the Bride dance to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and their performance captures the partigoers, forcing many of them to join in.
Frank and the Bride’s dance is a liturgy celebrating the resurrection itself. By taking a song about dressing up and acting high-class and performing it as a group of stitched-together outcasts, they mock the very idea of civilization. They mock a civilization that functions as a prison.
They declare to the patriarchy: we’ve read your script. We know how you want us to act, to dress. Who gets to speak and who has to stay silent. But it’s all a joke. The “ritz” burns, and we hold the matches. And frankly, we love the warmth of the fire.
The dance captures a joyful, violent, absurd moment of hope. It embodies the New Creation Paul celebrates in Galatians 6:15 - a reality where the old categories of circumcised or uncircumcised, male or female, living or dead, lose their meaning entirely. Without boxes there are no monsters. Or rather, everyone is a monster. All of us become new creatures.
VII. The Monsters We Must Become
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! reminds us that the Frankenstein story ignores the lightning bolt and the lab coat to focus entirely on the body. It asks who owns it, who stitches it together, and who holds the right to make it speak.
Politicians treat women’s bodies as battlegrounds for state control with exhausting, infuriating regularity. The Bride! offers a terrifying, beautiful alternative. It suggests our hope lies in outliving the architects of our misery. It calls us to a BRAIN STRIKE—a mental and spiritual withdrawal from the patriarchal Empire of the Living into the radical, welcoming Community of the Resurrected.
Traumas from our collective history stitch us together. But we carry our own Author in our bones. The Holy Spirit—the exact same terrifying, animating breath that raised Jesus from the slab, as Paul insists in Romans 8—possesses far more story to tell. This Spirit haunts our steps, ready to speak and work through us the second we open ourselves up to the holy possession. The film leaves us with a critical question: Will we remain silent in the jar? Or will we realize we already died to this world—and start putting on the ritz?
This review got me into a theater seat!