It’s been 5 years since Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial film debut. 2021’s The Lost Daughter was an assured first effort. The writing was nuanced and sleek, the premise was tense, and the performances were outstanding. I can’t say the same about The Bride!, Gyllenhaal’s latest film. It’s evident that the writer/director had a lot on her mind and aimed to make something impressive and bold, but the end result was something disappointing and thin.

Casting Jessie Buckley is enough to make something must watch cinema, but tack on Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Peter Sarsgaard, and you have something only a fool would skip. Even with all of this acting prowess on screen, you’re left with mostly dissatisfaction. The root of the issue is the screenplay and dialogue. Some actors weren’t given nearly enough to work with, I’m looking at Jake Gyllenhaal, Annette Bening, and Peter Sarsgaard, and some actors were given way too much, that’s where Jessie Buckley comes into play. When I say not given enough, I mean that the aforementioned actors’ dialogue was mostly matter of fact and was used to simply push plot rather than build characters. There wasn’t an ounce of intrigue to their on screen presence. 

Although putting talented actors in boring character vehicles is wasteful, overwriting the dialogue for your main character can be a death sentence. The Bride, played by Buckley, is somehow both underwritten and overwritten. Her character is underwritten, lacking real depth, yet paradoxically overwritten, with dialogue that is, at times, unbearable. Buckley was given the honor of delivering some of the film’s most cringey and bothersome lines. What makes her performance so intensely irksome was the abrupt and over-the-top jumping back and forth between two personalities. Not only does Buckley play Ida, the murdered woman who becomes The Bride, but she also plays Mary Shelley (yes, the author of Frankenstein), who is the film’s storyteller. Buckley’s Bride is a combination of the Chicago-bred Ida and the more intellectually-propper Shelley, who constantly pops in and out of Ida’s consciousness. This character suffers from Tourette Syndrome (I think this is implied), and this is represented by the constant switching of personalities.

What was meant to be a big, interesting swing turned into a lead performance that takes up far too much oxygen. It’s hard to fully fault Buckley here, especially when it’s abundantly clear that she put every ounce of her soul into the character. The lines she was given, and the manner in which she had to deliver them, ultimately fall on the director and screenwriter. In the grand scheme of things, The Bride is largely a shell of a character, and it’s not until after the film’s halfway point that some real sense of purpose and personality begins to click into place. Unfortunately, this development is short-lived, and the true story and identity of Ida/The Bride remain largely unexplored.

The lack of mystery and thematic exploration haunts the entire affair. The story takes place in 1930s Chicago, and is interestingly set against the backdrop of multiple women being murdered by what appears to be the same group of people. Rather than building the film around this intriguing concept, the tension is only briefly alluded to and ultimately used as a lazy bit of feminine-rage fuel (don’t get me wrong though, the rage is warranted). Instead of spelling out to the audience why and how things are evil and misogynistic, Gyllenhaal would have been better served developing a story that intertwined those elements more naturally. Too much time is wasted at the beginning of the film getting to the point of The Bride’s creation. Rather than a partial origin story, a film that simply drops us into a world where The Bride already exists could have made a much larger impact. Wouldn’t it be more compelling to learn about The Bride’s identity and background while she’s acting as a vigilante, investigating these murders, or even on the run from the killers themselves? A 25-minute origin story followed by an hour-long police chase simply isn’t engaging cinema.

A flimsy script can occasionally be saved by other means. A sensational performance or impressive visuals can make a film enjoyable, even if it is ultimately unmemorable. That wasn’t the case with The Bride!. Although the film looks good enough, there isn’t enough there visually to even deem it “style over substance.” Gyllenhaal’s feminist fever dream had a lot going for it: good source material, a breathtaking cast, and incredibly noble intentions. Unfortunately, it almost entirely crumbled under the weight of her ambition.

4.9/10

Movie: The Bride! (2026)
Production Companies: First Love Films, In the Current Company
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Producer(s): Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Talia Kleinhendler, Osnat Handelsman-Keren
Directed by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Written by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring: Jessi Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard, Jake Gyllenhaal
Review by: Stefano Todaro